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Budget
2024-25 |
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| A
Budget of Great Cynicism |
| Feb
10th 2025, Prabhat Patnaik |
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No
budget in post-independence India had been as openly cynical
about the lives of the vast masses of the working people
as the one presented on February 1, 2025. All pundits, from
the finance minister downwards, agree that the strategy
of the budget is to stimulate the economy by boosting middle
class consumption through tax-cuts.
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| Budget-making
as Political Instrument |
| Feb
4th 2025, C.P. Chandrasekhar |
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If
an element of surprise is a hallmark of a good budget, then
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman can pride herself on
having won the day on February 1. In a briefer than usual
Budget speech, reflecting impatience to get to the end,
Sitharaman concluded with an unexpectedly large tax break
for the tax paying middle classes.
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| The
Goal of Viksit Bharat, the Budget's play with Numbers |
| Feb
3rd 2025, C.P. Chandrasekhar |
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Implicit
in the Budget is the hope that tax concessions will result
in spending and also reviving GDP growth, and 'incentivising'
the corporate sector will revive private investment.
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| The
Inhumanity Engendered by Capitalism |
| Feb
16th 2025, Prabhat Patnaik |
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| Georg
Lukacs, the renowned Marxist philosopher had once remarked
that "even the worst socialism was better than the best
capitalism”. That remark made in 1969 and repeated in 1971,
no doubt on the basis of Lukacs’ perception of actually existing
socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe with which
he was familiar, had been treated sceptically even in Western
Left circles at the time. |
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| The
Dangers of Centralisation |
| Feb
3rd 2025, Prabhat Patnaik |
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| Well-known
Marxist scholar, the late Amalendu Guha, had argued persuasively
that in modern India there co-existed in the minds of the
people a dual national consciousness: a local, regional-linguistic
nationality consciousness, of being a Bengali, or a Tamil,
or a Gujarati or an Odiya; and also simultaneously an overarching
pan-Indian consciousness. |
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The
Sensex, the Rupee, the FIIs and the RBI |
| Feb
18th 2025. C.P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh |
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| The
decline in various stock market indices may just be the much-needed
correction after an unsustainable bull run. But it can have
collateral effects that may be systemically destabilising.
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The
Recent Past and Present of Agriculture |
| Feb
4th 2025. C.P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh |
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| Agriculture
in India has been resilient despite facing many challenges,
but these have not led to better public distribution for those
in need. Ignoring demands of the farmers’ movement can have
serious consequences for future cultivation and food security.
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| Jayati
Ghosh: Rebalancing power |
| Dec
10th 2024. |
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The
renowned development economist, Jayati Ghosh, offers an eye-opening
perspective on the different facets of inequality and the
need for systemic change to address them, bringing together
her interests in international trade and finance, employment
patterns in developing countries, as well as issues related
to gender and development. |
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| Young
Scholars Conference Political Economy of Contemporary South
Asia |
| October
13-14, 2023 | Berkeley, United States |
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| Jun
14th 2023. |
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Our
key theme is the political economy of contemporary South Asia.
At the core of these transformations are the fraught and so-called
"truncated transition," where South Asian societies
are not making the transition from farm to factory, but the
rise of informal economies, industrial clusters, in-between
agrarian-urban and peri-urban spaces force us to rethink familiar
transition narratives and to eschew them in favour of more
grounded theories. |
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