-Business Standard Leading economic indicators suggest a recovery is underway It’s difficult to make sense of what’s happening in the rural economy. On the one hand, leading economic indicators suggest a recovery is underway. As Chart 1 shows, unemployment is down and real wage growth is up. Two-wheeler sales are also up — suggesting a recovery in household demand. Yet, rural sentiment has weakened of late as shown in Chart 2. Please...

-The Economic Times Farmers are agitated. Loan waivers have not stemmed protests or farmer suicides. This is a multidimensional problem and also a huge political opportunity for parties that can think constructively. Waiving loans is bad policy. It adds to the fiscal stress of states, straining under the electricity utility debt they have taken over. The states would undo the Centre’s hard-wrought fiscal discipline, scaring rating agencies. Waived loans bring little benefit to...

-The Hindu Sans quality jobs, ‘aspirational young India’ will become ‘angry young India’ The government – and Paytm – may not agree, but there are some downsides to the rising digitisation and connectivity. One is an unleashing of aspirations. Everyone wants not just what Bengal’s leftists used to contemptuously dismiss as components of the middle-class Indian dream — gaadi, baadi, chaakri (car, home, job) — but a whole lot of other things....

-The Economic Times blog Farmers, from Punjab in the north to Tamil Nadu in the south, have started agitations demanding farm loans be waived. The Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra governments have already considered it politically expedient to write them off. Some other states may follow the suit. However, such decisions are as misguided as they are misleading. Nonetheless, it will be a mistake to treat the agitations as a domino effect of...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today directly linked the slowdown in growth to demonetisation, pointed out that private investments had almost dried up and expressed deep concern over a jobs crunch. The most authoritative Opposition voice on the economy was speaking at the Congress Working Committee meeting, five months after describing demonetisation as "organised loot and legalised plunder" and warning that growth would be severely affected. "India's GDP numbers...