-The Hindu Business Line/ NetworkIdeas.org With India experiencing a severe second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, forcing decentralized lockdowns, a crisis of loss of jobs and livelihoods and resulting hunger is being reported from across the country. A reluctant central government has, therefore, been forced to revive the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana (PMGKAY), to distribute 5 kilograms of free foodgrain per person per month to the approximately 80 crore...

Quite often it is argued by mainstream economists that a sizeable chunk of the Union Budget every year is wasted because the Government spends that on food and fertiliser subsidies. The burgeoning size of these two subsidies relative to the entire budget as well as the gross domestic product (GDP) is often used to build the argument that economic as well as environmental sustainability of the country is at stake...

-The Hindu The paradox becomes clearer by recognising the circuit of financial flows beyond the real economy Divergences between the booming financial and the stagnant real sectors, which appear rather confounding as well as disconcerting, warrant an explanation. Enumerating the facts in India’s major secondary stock market, the Sensex (the benchmark index of the BSE Limited, or formerly the Bombay Stock Exchange Ltd.) has been found tracking an upward path, from 40,817 on...

The World Economic Outlook – a bi-annual publication of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) -- released in October 2020 has anticipated that the economic progress made by the countries since the 1990s to reduce poverty would be turned upside down by the COVID-19 pandemic. On top of that, economic disparity would rise too in the post-COVID world because the crisis has disproportionately impacted women, informal sector workers and people with...

-The Indian Express In back-to-back moves aimed at controlling onion prices, the government has relaxed import norms and now reintroduced Stock Limits. Why have prices been rising, and how far can these moves check the rise? With less than a week to go for the Bihar elections, the Centre on Friday reintroduced the Stock Limit on onions — a move aimed at controlling rising prices, which crossed Rs 80 per kg in...