-TheWire.in A claim of an 8.4% real GDP growth rate has little relevance even as rural India battles plummeting wage levels, depleted incomes and widespread unemployment. With the release of the GDP figures for the quarter ending September, the government machinery has been in full swing advancing the narrative that economic growth is indeed back on track. However, sorely missing from these narratives is the inconvenient factoid on the currently dismal state of...

-TheWire.in In the face of a surplus of cereals and ever-dwindling prices as a consequence, farmers with small and medium sized land holdings have tried to shift to the cultivation of perishable fruits and vegetables. Their incomes, however, are still hamstrung by a lack of rural cold storage facilities in the country. The farmers of India have won an epic victory. For 15 months, they braved the biting cold, cruel heat, misrepresentation,...

The increase in the total number of suicides committed in India during 2020 in comparison to the previous years has hit the headlines recently. While some media commentators have stated that the economic distress (caused by job loss, income loss, failure of business, and growing hunger, among other things) in 2020 could have led to more suicides being committed, others have said that home isolation and deteriorating mental health (associated...

-Newsclick.in The Biden administration is realising this. The need of the hour, therefore, is to build a post-pandemic growth strategy centred on an increase in public investment and public spending. The period of neo-liberalism witnesses an increase in the share of economic surplus in total output both in individual countries and also for the world as a whole. This is because the “opening” up of the economy to freer trade in goods...

-Countercurrents.org Real life has a way of surprising theory. One of the most intensely discussed theoretical questions on the Left has been how to bring agricultural labourers and peasants, including well-to-do peasants, together in a common struggle against landlord domination in India’s countryside. Numerous Marxist gatherings have for years discussed the contradiction between peasants and labourers holding up a decisive resolution of the contradiction between the landlords and the rest of...