-The Financial Express The one irrefutable lesson from MGNREGA, is that once introduced, there will be no going back India is one of the most unequal countries in the world. In terms of Gini coefficient, i.e., measure of income inequity, India ranks a dismal 135 out of 187 countries. This means that most of the prosperity that an increasingly economically liberalised India is seeing, belongs primarily to the top-income percentiles. One in...
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Before Universal Basic Income, We Must First Get Social Spending Basics Right -Anjana Thampi and Ishan Anand
-TheWire.in The Economic Survey 2016-17 devotes a chapter to the provision of a Universal Basic Income (UBI), describing it as a “raging new idea,” a “radical new vision” and “the shortest path to eliminating poverty”. While warning that the UBI “should not become the Trojan horse that usurps the fiscal space for a well-functioning state,” the survey says a de facto UBI can be instituted in the existing “fiscal space”. It...
More »Addressing energy poverty in India -Debajit Palit
-The Hindu Business Line The spread of rural electrification has been overestimated, and the adoption of subsidised LPG has not picked up It is little more than a year since the Sustainable Development Goals were agreed to at the UN General Assembly. SDGs are a set of 17 goals that are intended to dramatically improve lives across the world by 2030. A major goal is SDG7 which aims to ensure universal access...
More »Hunger and hard facts -TK Rajalakshmi
-Frontline.in In the latest Global Hunger Index, India is bracketed in the category of countries where hunger levels are “serious”. But the policy responses on hunger and malnutrition in the country have been inadequate and faulty. In the second week of October, a few media reports in India highlighted significant data pertaining to global hunger. The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) had released its Global Hunger Index (GHI), rating 118...
More »The dynamic nature of poverty -Sonalde Desai & Amit Thorat
-The Hindu We need to rethink social safety nets in India’s growing economy so that they can also focus on the accidents of life rather than solely on the accidents of birth. Sometimes the grand narratives of the Left and the Right do not seem to have any relationship with the lived experiences of ordinary Indians. For the past two decades, the Left has tried to expand social welfare programmes for the...
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