-The Hindu Business Line Drop the euphoria for a moment - a third of India is seriously poor. And urban poverty has risen sharply The latest report on the number of poor Indians shows a third of the population living below the recalibrated poverty lines. C Rangarajan, a former governor of the Reserve Bank of India and former chairman of the Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council, was asked to look into the matter...

-The Hindu Business Line   Perpetual growth is a piece of nonsense. The focus should be on protecting livelihoods through sustainable means Construct a building, demolish it, reconstruct, break it down again, and go on repeating this meaningless exercise. You will have economic growth, as currently measured. But no net gain in employment during the endless cycle of construction and demolition, no net increase in productive capacity, and no appreciable change in poverty...

-The Hindu   India is among the world champions of social underspending. Without enlightened social policies, growth mania is unlikely to deliver more under the new government than it did under the previous one Few people today remember the letter written on August 7, 2013 by Mr. Narendra Modi, then Chief Minister of Gujarat, to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. In this letter, available on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) website, Mr. Modi criticised...

-The Business Standard   Why Indian unemployment figures puzzle many Census data released on Tuesday contained a shocking piece of information: that 47 million young Indians, under the age of 24, were jobless, and looking for work. That's 20 per cent of the youth population. This is hard data confirming a fact that has long been anecdotal: that India has a jobs crisis. The picture that emerges from the Census data is intriguing:...

-The Hindu Business Line That could shift if the land acquisition law is changed The real action on economic policy is set to take place outside the Budget. A major move on the cards (which Rural Development Minister Nitin Gadkari sought to downplay late last week) is to amend the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act to reduce the cost of land for industry. Is...