-The Hindu The Finance Minister’s prescriptions are a classic case of being unable to see the wood for the trees, be it on the tax proposals, the rural outreach or the bank bailout. It was a marathon achievement: 12,187 words in 111 minutes. True, there were no interruptions; the Finance Minister virtually sent the House to sleep. I have listened to many Budget speeches; and I cannot say that Dr. Manmohan Singh...

-Business Standard Indian economy is closely integrated with the global economy, which is facing a slowdown, and so the headwinds are difficult to avoid, Chief Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian told journalists in an interaction after presenting the Economic Survey 2015-16. In this uncertain environment, monetary and fiscal policies should aim to purchase insurance, so to speak, against the global slowdown, he said. Edited excerpts: * In the backdrop of a global slowdown,...

-TheHansIndia.com The ongoing drought is fuelling distress migration from districts in Telangana, a trend that was witnessed in the early 2000s. The severe drought conditions for the second consecutive year have led to crop failure, mounting debts, chronic unemployment and failure of the NREGA scheme, especially in the districts of Mahbubnagar, Medak, and Adilabad, forcing large-scale exodus of farmers and others.   The fruits of a people’s movement and the world’s largest anti-poverty...

-The Hindu It is only due to the high rates of growth in the services sector that India’s overall economic growth appears robust. The world economy is so hard to predict. In 2008, as the global financial markets plunged into a crisis, high oil prices were considered to be one of the factors that caused it. Today, many fear that the world economy is on the edge of another recession. Guess what...

-Business Standard Four of the 6 large states have seen uptick in rural wages, following equally sharp increase in coverage of the rural employment guarantee scheme After months of stagnation, rural wages have started inching up, albeit marginally. Coinciding with a renewed push to the rural employment guarantee scheme in the second half of 2015, rural wages have shown a marginal uptick since August. It remained nearly flat from December 2014 to...