Neither the union budget nor the National Health Policy 2017 presents any clear and convincing health sector road map. If it is serious about providing health care to even bottom 40% of the population, not only should the government increase its current budgetary allocation substantially but also strengthen the health infrastructure at all levels including a strong regulatory mechanism.

The strategy of the current budget seems to be simple: make immense noise about “helping the victimized” but do not give an extra paisa from the budget towards that ends. With the expenditure squeeze being carried out to reduce fiscal deficit, the share of central government spending in GDP is in fact budgeted to fall.

Even the vaguely "pink" effort in the Economic Survey is whitewashed in the finance minister's Budget speech that is heavily based on stereotypical gender roles for women, and even that completely disappears when we get to the actual budget allocations.

For those with short memories, let's remind ourselves that Arun Jaitley has been promising “top priority to farmers” for a while now.

The Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba creates a startling sales record on this year’s Singles’ Day, tapping into the rising consumerism of the upper middle class. The surge may not yield the home market growth needed to rebalance the country’s growth.

The slight upgrade of India’s credit worthiness by Moody, that equates finance with nation, is being celebrated by the media as a mark of Modi’s success, but the criteria it has used to judge are in actuality open assaults by the government on the working population. To transcend such neo-liberal capitalism, the wrongness of this criteria must be understood first.

Central banks are deciding to scale back their policy of "quantitative easing" in the form of liquidity infusion through asset purchases, but they are unwilling to commit to a quick unwinding of balance sheets fearing market reaction to a radical change in the easy money environment.

The failure of digitisation is the result of the Central government's cart-before-horse attitude to policy, which does not take into account the wider context and the supportive and enabling conditions that must be met for any policy measure to succeed.

The government's proposal to set up an all-powerful entity to solve the NPA problem has serious implications for banks and could leave them vulnerable to, among other things, runs by depositors.

The current slowdown in the economy, aggravated by the persistent world economic crisis, has much to do with the twin coercive instruments of demonetisation and GST wielded by the state to strangulate the informal economy in a bid to "formalise" it.

In the discussions about GST, the class content of this new tax regime has been missed. Through an overall increase in the taxation of the informal sector i.e. of the petty producers and the small capitalists, it has unleashed the twin process of centralization of political authority and the centralization of capital, which in turn strengthen one another.

The BJP government, through demonetization and GST, coupled with the world economic situation, it is causing a rare co-occurrence of three phenomena: a stagnation of the countrys' economy, a revival of inflation, and a yawning current account deficit on the balance of payments. As the era of cheap money in the U.S. and elsewhere come to an end, Indian assets might pass into foreign hands.

The most recent deceleration in growth is the result of the inability of the system to sustain the artificial stimuli that the neoliberal policy environment facilitated. It is a problem that does not lend itself to easy resolution.

The recent RBI report that shows that 99% of the demonetized currency notes have been returned proves false the governments’ claim that the scheme, that shook the whole economy, would cripple the black economy, an argument whose success lay in the demonetized currency not coming back to the system. Moreover, with re-monetization complete, there has been no "flushing out" of black money whatsoever.

Indias' reliance on fortuitous and volatile stimuli to drive growth has resulted in inadequate job creation and widened inequalities while failing to address social deprivation.

Democracy in India faces a severe threat from the penchant for centralization and uniformity that the Hindutva forces have and which Modi articulated in the Central Hall on July 1 through his misleading analogy between the GST and the integration of princely states by Vallabhbhai Patel during Independence. Such comparison puts a tax reform and democratic revolution on the same platform, confusing biased centralization with unity of the country.

The few days old Volume II of the Economic Survey by Ministry of Finance shows a GVA growth rate much less than that of the previous year, and that too artificially boosted by seasonal variations in non-core sectors. This deceleration is most likely to continue, with growing NPAs and plunging exports, and interest rate cuts will not help in a demand-constrained economy unless the government starts thinking beyond "fiscal rectitude".

It was the free flow of foreign capital through "financial liberalization" that led to the East Asian Crisis of 1997, from which the "tiger economies" have not yet recovered fully. Even now, the augmented foreign reserves of these third world countries remain woefully inadequate to finance debt to foreigners, as the hegemony of international finance capital builds over their own assets.

The problem of large NPAs of nationalised banks can be traced to the neoliberal reforms in the financial sector and outside, which prevent large government investments in infrastructure and capital-intensive industries that are imperative for development but too difficult a responsibility for the private sector to shoulder.

There is no sign of any consensus coming out of the G20 on the need for a mix of globally coordinated policies and a fiscal push to pull the world economy out of recession. What we have once again is a set of statements that says everything and therefore nothing.

The very limited Barclays prosecution comes in the wake of a half-hearted investigation effort, which has thus far completely let off all those who took the world economy to the verge of a crisis akin to the Great Depression. It is not clear if anything will finally come out of even this case, which is aimed at merely teaching a lesson to those who hurt a bunch of financial investors by violating insider rules.

The idea of "Universal Basic Income", today treated as novel, in fact dates back to Kautilya's Arthashastra and Thomas Mores' Utopia in the 16th century. Milton Friedman's "negative income tax" also revolved around the same idea, which was rightfully criticized by Minsky for inducing inflationary expansion in place of direct welfare schemes. Considering distributional effects, direct job creation is a more effective way to tackle poverty.

The policy shifts of the reform era have not been in favor of agriculture. Trade liberalisation, deregulation and a greater role for market forces have not benefited the farmer, who is trapped in a persisting crisis. It is time for today's policy makers to recognise their own disconnect, and learn from the evidence at hand.

The release of the third of the Financial Stability Reports being prepared by the RBI provides new information on the state and behaviour of the Indian banking system. While banks appear well capitalised and their balance sheets robust, at the margin they seem to be embracing too much risk.

A comparison of the results of the 55th, 61st and 64th Rounds of the NSS permits an assessment of the trends in employment in India during the years when India transited to an era of high growth. It suggests that some of the optimism generated by the results for 2004-05 may not be warranted.

It is now evident that the world economy is in for another spate of major problems, with recession and stagnation likely to affect the largest economies and altering prospects for growth elsewhere. This article examines recent patterns of the Indian economy's external engagement, in order to gauge how well equipped it is to face this uncertain future.

There was a sudden resurgence in Keynesian ideas everywhere when the global financial crisis broke in September 2008. But, equally suddenly, financial markets have once again turned back on state intervention and policy makers are giving in to demands for massive cuts in public expenditure that would require enormous sacrifices from their populations.

The passing of a draft version of the Foreign Educational Institutions Bill by the Union Cabinet has raised certain questions with protagonists and opponents expressing a range of views on the subject. While there is a fear that the process underway is one of creating a window for foreign players and then changing the rules in their favour, question is also raised whether the implementation of the Bill amounts to skewing further the inequality in access to higher education.

The significant appreciation of the rupee in recent months, driven by a surge in foreign portfolio capital inflows, has revived old and generated new problems for macroeconomic management. This signals once again that the need is not for further capital account liberalisation but for the imposition of additional controls on the cross-border flows of capital.