-Livemint.com Rural development secretary Amarjeet Sinha on how MGNREGS has evolved since 2006 to result in income, acreage, water tables, productivity and fodder availability Agrarian distress and rural distress are terms used interchangeably, but the rural economy today is very different from what it was many years ago, given the diversification of rural incomes and hence incorrect to think one means the other, says Amarjeet Sinha, secretary, ministry of rural development. In...

-TheWire.in Apart from subsuming all earlier Central and state schemes under the PMUY to boost numbers, a major proportion of scheme beneficiaries cannot afford to use gas despite getting a free connection. New Delhi: The Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) is one of the flagship schemes of the Narendra Modi government. Officially launched on May 1, 2016, the government regards it as one of its greatest success stories. The official claim is...

-Firstpost.com Was that a bouncer to the political opposition or was that a googly to Prime Minister Narendra Modi from an esteemed colleague in the cabinet? Trying to decipher Road Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari's latest jibe at caste-based quota seekers in government jobs amid protests by Marathas in his home state of Maharashtra is as tricky as discussing the current valuations of Sensex stocks or whether Cheteshwar Pujara would have helped India...

-Livemint.com The job of policy strategists is always to identify the binding constraints to growth and then try to figure out which policies will help ease them Economists of a certain vintage will remember the old development models in which rapid economic growth was held back by three key constraints. The first was the savings constraint. A poor country such as India could not save enough of its annual national income to sustain...

-TheWire.in Mexican economist David Barkin on India's neoliberal economics, growing inequalities, agrarian distress and more. David Barkin is Professor of Economics at the Metropolitan Autonomous University in Mexico City. He received his doctorate in economics from Yale University and was awarded the National Prize in Political Economics in 1979 for his analysis of Inflation in Mexico. His research has focused on the development of an alternative to the capitalist economic model. In an...