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...

-TheNewsMinute.com This amount has been pending for the last five months, according to daily wage earners and activists in the state. Grappling with the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, thousands of rural labourers in Andhra Pradesh turned to National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) to earn a livelihood as several sectors of the economy have been affected. However, pending wages are adding to the woes of NREGA workers who mainly hail from...

-Scroll.in The report by Varieties of Democracy Institute said India is as autocratic as Pakistan in censorship and worse than Bangladesh and Nepal. India has turned into an “electoral autocracy”, an analytical research project by Sweden-based Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute said. The research institute had said last year that the Bharatiya Janata Party now closely resembles a “typical governing party in an autocracy”. A report of the organisation, which conceptualises and measures democracy,...

-The Indian Express With a more accurate way of measuring GDP growth, the pace of recovery is much slower in real terms Imagine driving a car whose speedometer cannot tell the current speed but only relative to what it was four hours ago. Apart from the comical encounters with police when stopped for speeding and the predicament in defining a “speed limit”, there is a more fundamental problem it would create. The...

-Livemint.com * In 2006, Bihar abolished state-run mandis. What followed is a forewarning for India’s new farm laws * The system is rigged in favour of the traders who cheat on every possible parameter—from weight to moisture level—which is why very few farmers come to Bihar’s mandis to sell produce ARARIA/ PURNEA: Biren Bahardar thinks he is too small to raise his voice. Local traders can fleece at will while purchasing his harvest....