There is some respite expected for India in terms of prices of imported commodities. This may ease the depletion of its foreign exchange reserves. The country has faced a widening of its merchandise trade deficit from US$ -17.91 billion to US$ -26.91 billion between October 2021 and October 2022. The commodity price data provided by the World Bank in December 2022 (termed as The Pink Sheet) shows that energy prices plummeted by...
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A layperson's guide to understanding the global Human Development Report 2021/22
It is hard for the media to ignore the findings of global Human Development Report (HDR) whenever a newer and updated version is released. Every time when the HDR is published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), media persons and commentators tend to compare the performance of their respective countries with that of performance in previous years as also with respect to the relative performance of other nations. One of...
More »A betrayal of the social sector when it needs help -Dipa Sinha
-The Hindu The government seems to have prioritised meeting its fiscal deficit targets rather than using this opportunity to signal a path of employment-centred and inclusive growth India continues to rank poorly in various global indices that reflect the quality of life, human capital or human development in the country, such as the Human Development Index (rank 131 out of 189 countries) and the Global Hunger Index (rank 101 out of 116...
More »Are we witnessing depeasantisation in Indian agriculture?
The newly released Situation Assessment Survey of Agricultural Households and Land and Livestock Holdings of Households in Rural India (NSS 77th Round) establishes the fact that the farm households are more and more relying on wage incomes instead of 'net incomes from crop cultivation' for their livelihoods. In Marxian lexicon, proletarisation (a term that we can loosely use for depeasantisation) refers to the process in which the farmers/ tillers are...
More »Southern states had a higher proportion of indebted farm households in 2019, shows NSO survey
The Situation Assessment Survey of Agricultural Households and Land and Livestock Holdings of Households in Rural India (NSS 77th Round), which was released recently, informs one about farm households' income in the crop year 2018-19 and indebtedness in 2019 (as on the date of survey), among other things. Prior to the recent report, Land and Livestock Holding Surveys (LHS) and Situation Assessment Survey (SAS) of Agricultural Households used to be...
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