Economic Times ⁽²¹⁸⁾

(Abstract or Full-text unavailable)

Even the popular narrative, which paints the ST as the victims of development, is thoroughly falsified by the evidence.Read full article Evidence that poverty has declined since India began to liberalise in the 1980s, that the acceleration in growth to 8-9% range since the mid-2000s has resulted in accelerated poverty reduction and that these trends hold for each broad social group rather than just the aggregate population is as irrefutable as it gets in social sciences. In the accompanying graphic, taken from a recent study by Megha Mukim and the author, show the proportion of the population below the conventional poverty lines in rural and urban areas, respectively, in 1983, 1987-88, 1993-94 and 2004-05 among the scheduled castes (SC), scheduled tribes (ST) and non-scheduled (NS) castes. The years selected in these figures are those associated with large-scale expenditure surveys conducted by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO). The NSSO conducts these surveys only approximately once every five years.

Rahul and Sonia Gandhi should lend the Prime Minister a hand in moving the reforms forward just as Prime Minister Narasimha Rao had once done.Read full article So much has already been written on the UP elections that one might ask what more is there to say. Yet, the subject is so fascinating that it is hard to resist. Outcomes in state level elections have lately come to depend critically, though surely not exclusively, on the performance of the incumbent government. As Jagdish Bhagwati and I had originally hypothesised in 2004, the post-1991 reforms had demonstrated that rapid improvement in the economic fortunes was possible and had consequently unleashed a revolution of rising expectations. According to this hypothesis, embraced by numerous commentators recently, voters reward performing governments and punish nonperforming ones. Because individuals think of the state government as having the greatest impact on their lives, this effect operates with potency at the level of the state.

The latest example of this trend is the policy package relaxing foreign direct investment (FDI) in single-brand retail from 51% to 100%.See full article Rather than promote inclusion through reforms, which would pave the way for rapid expansion of labour-intensive manufactures and, hence, well-paid jobs for the low-skilled, and through redistribution, which would directly transfer income from the rich to the poor, we seem to have set on a course to converting every policy into the instrument of advancing social goals. The consequent muddying of policy waters has been distorting incentives, undermining the primary objective of the policy while opening ever more avenues to corruption. The latest example of this trend is the policy package relaxing foreign direct investment (FDI) in single-brand retail from 51% to 100%. Rather than do away FDI cap in a clean way, the policy requires retailers going beyond 51% FDI to source 30% of the value of products they sell from Indian small and village industries. Thus, a policy that was meant to remove a distortion and facilitate commercial transactions to take place freely has been…

Read full article (Abstract or Full-text unavailable)