-Frontline.in The increase in the budgetary allocation for the MGNREGA is only marginal. The scheme helped lower the poverty level by 32 per cent between 2004-05 and 2011-12, but government support for it has been declining steadily. In the beginning, economists belonging to the Right and the Left were of the view that the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) was merely a populist measure. While the former believed...

-Livemint.com Manufacturing is the biggest positive contributor to aggregate employment elasticity in the country, a fact which might appear counter-intuitive to many New Delhi: One of the biggest criticisms of India’s high growth trajectory this century has been its failure to generate jobs. economists attribute this phenomenon to a decline in employment elasticity of output, which means that the same amount of output growth creates fewer jobs than it used to....

-Economic and Political Weekly The Modi government tries hard to signal a makeover but beyond the symbolic it does not change much. Budget 2016 is not important for the proposals that it has made but for what it tries to signal about the proposed makeover, in a limited way, of the Narendra Modi government. The budget does try hard to claim that the Modi government is not a “suit-boot” administration, an image...

-Livemint.com A useful way to judge the feasibility of Arun Jaitley’s targets can be to look at how such indicators have behaved in the past While announcing an increase in rural spending, finance minister Arun Jaitley also set himself a target of doubling “the income of farmers by 2022” in this year’s budget. Laudable as the ambition is, how achievable is it? First, there is the question of nominal versus real increase...

-The Hindu We cannot permit gross inequality-linked deprivation to leave its malign signature on the lives of those who are yet to come. As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of the markets and financial speculation, and by attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution can be found for the world’s problems. Inequality is the root of social ills. —...