Modicare: Peoples’ mukti was never so cheap!
The Edit Budget is essentially a financial exercise with a little tinge of political messaging. The ritual this year was different. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley made captivating announcements with catchy slogans like “ease of living”, “minimum government and maximum governance”,…
BUDGET 2018-19: A Neoliberal Blueprint
Finance minister Arun Jaitley presented the union budget 2018-19 in Lok Sabha on February 1 as a budget for ‘generation of employment, health protection of country’s 50 crore vulnerable people and huge relief to farmers’. The opposition dubbed it as…
Where is the money, Mr. Jaitley?
This government is especially good at optics, at managing public perceptions to persuade people that it is working for them, rather than doing so. So it is no surprise that Arun Jaitley’s pre-election budget speech went on about how much…
The myth of the Indian ‘New Middle Class’
The Debate: Indian Middle Class At the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was welcomed by a big turnout at the plenary session and introduced by WEF founder, Klaus Schwab, as the leader of a…
India’s burgeoning middle class Livemint Tue, Jan 23 2018 Recently, The Economist published a detailed briefing analysing the Indian middle class. As per our understanding, the author cites various data sources and studies to make one overarching point: any companies…
PNB scam: How a system was gamed
And so the hunt begins. A handful of bank officials who perpetrated the fraud at India’s second- largest public sector bank — leading to unauthorised issue of Letters of Undertaking (LoUs) to jeweller Nirav Modi’s firms — have been brought…
A timeline of developments in the $2 billion – PNB fraud
The $2 billion fraud at Punjab National Bank (PNB) has shaken India’s financial sector. Here’s a timeline of t he development in the case A $2 billion fraud at India’s second-biggest state-run lender Punjab National Bank (PNB) has shaken the…
In hindsight, it seems like a scandal foretold. On July 26, 2016, an online complaint sent by the Bengaluru-based businessman Hari Prasad S.V. to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) stated: “I would like to bring to your notice a major…
‘The Present as History’ and the Theory of Monopoly Capital
MONTHLY REVIEW, Volume 69, Issue 09 (February 2018) (Grzegorz Konat is an economist at the Institute of Agricultural and Food Economics, National Research Institute, Warsaw, and a frequent contributor to the Polish edition of Le Monde diplomatique. John Bellamy Foster…
The UGC Directive on Autonomous Colleges
HIGHER education in India is facing a twin danger today. One is its commoditisation, by which is meant not just the fact that higher education itself is becoming a commodity but also that the products of higher education, ie, those…
Social media giants work with Indian government to censor Internet
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, working in conjunction with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Internet technology companies, is intensifying its censorship of selected websites and social media accounts. According to recent data, 1,329 social media URLs were blocked on the…
Sri Lanka orders social media networks blocked
Sri Lanka barred social messaging networks including Facebook on Wednesday to stem violence against minority Muslims after mob attacks continued despite the imposition of emergency on the Buddhist-majority island. Tension has been growing between the two communities in Sri Lanka…
Aadhaar Act is a black act, it declares an open war against citizens’ rights & their sensitive information Centre, several States & Banks violating Supreme Court’s order on biometric UID/Aadhaar likely to face music In a significant development in the matter of Unique…
German union wins right to 28-hour working week and 4.3% pay rise
FT, FEBRUARY 6, 2018 German workers won a key victory in their fight for a better work-life balance when a big employers’ group agreed to demands from the country’s largest trade union for the introduction of a 28-hour working week.…