-Livemint.com * There is no such thing as a freebie in economics because ultimately somebody has to bear the cost of the supposedly free giveaways * CAG’s financial audit for 2013-18 concluded that Delhi has no debt sustainability issues as its GSDP grew faster than its public debt The Aam Aadmi Party’s win in the Delhi elections has inspired others to replicate its strategy. The West Bengal government’s last full budget before state...

-Down to Earth Nirmala Sitharaman's Budget has all the ingredients to deepen India’s farm crisis These are desperate times for India. Rural unemployment was at a 45-year-high while consumption expenditure of rural families fell 9 per cent between 2011-12 and 2017-18, according to a report by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO), which the government never released but got leaked to the media in November 2019. Between 2011-12 and 2015-16, the income of farmers...

-Newsclick.in Joblessness is zooming, inflation is at six-year high led by food inflation, exports are down further, industrial production is stagnant and investment is at a standstill. In the last six months or so, the Modi government has supposedly been paying close attention to the sinking economy, with a flurry of meetings, announcements of freebies to corporates, fervent assurances to markets and budget shenanigans to supposedly keep the deficit in check and...

-The Hindu Among this year’s Padma Shri awardees are a father and daughter who turned a barren wasteland into a riot of trees and crops Furrowed with deep gullies, its topsoil all but gone, this degraded patch of land near Odagaon in Odisha’s Nayagarh district was once a dense forest. Whenever nature tried to reclaim it, the little shoots would be nibbled away by goats and sheep. The villagers who owned the...

-The Hindu There are many parallels but also important differences between the current protests and the JP movement of the 70s, says this eminent historian A historian of modern India, Gyan Prakash is the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University and author of the 2018 book Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point. He compares the current situation in the country to the turmoil of the 70s. Excerpts: * How would...