-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...

Apart from gross domestic product (GDP) and gross value added (GVA), another indicator which shows whether an economy is thriving or stagnating is the growth in bank credit. Credit is a critical input in the production of goods and services. It is generally the case that during prosperous times, economic actors, who are engaged in different sectors or in various industry, take up bank loans to invest. The provisional data...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: As much as Rs 110 crore of the Rs 610 crore of unaccounted money seized in raids during Demonetisation was in new Rs 2,000 and Rs 500 notes, indicating misuse of windows offered by the government to change old currency. The new currency seized by police and income tax officials was partly generated through routes such as petrol pumps, railway and airline ticketing and toll plazas...

-GovernanceNow.com Banning cattle slaughter, like Demonetisation, may deliver political gains but will hit the rural economy hard More than a century ago, a team of officials from Brazil toured some villages of Kheda district, in central Gujarat. They had come to procure breeding bulls of the famous Kankreji breed, notes Bhailal Patel, a charismatic institution-builder who was also the first leader of opposition in Gujarat assembly, in his memoirs. It was of...

-GovernanceNow.com The cost of maintaining our 5.3 million stray cattle comes to about Rs 30,115 core per year A lot of debate that we witness in the media on the cattle question these days suffer from the disease of speculative utopian imagination of a ‘cow-nation’ and relentless abuses for those beef-eating ‘others’.   Political debates over the question of our bovine stock has mostly been heavily polarising and mindlessly simplistic, notwithstanding exceptions like veteran...