Jharkhand: Where Is the Mineral Wealth Going?
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Jharkhand: Where Is the Mineral Wealth Going?

Subodh Varma   According to various estimates, Jharkhand has 40% of the country’s mineral resources. It has 27.3 per cent of India’s coal reserves, 26 per cent of iron ore, 18.5 per cent copper ore, besides having deposits of uranium, mica, bauxite, granite, limestone, silver, graphite, magnetite and dolomite. It also has large quantities of…

Pathetic State of Economy: Modi Govt Hides Data
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Pathetic State of Economy: Modi Govt Hides Data

Prabhat Patnaik   The National Statistical Office (NSO) has decided not to release the quinquennial survey data on consumer expenditure for 2017–18. This is because these data, leaked by The Business Standard (November 15) show a drop of 3.7 per cent in real per capita consumer expenditure between 2011–12 and 2017–18, from Rs 1,501 per…

Finance Ministry Rejected RBI’s Dissent on Electoral Bonds 
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Finance Ministry Rejected RBI’s Dissent on Electoral Bonds 

Gaurav Vivek Bhatnagar   The Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI’s) repeated warnings on the electoral bond scheme in bearer form having the potential to increase black money circulation, money laundering, cross-border counterfeiting and forgery were ignored by the Centre as it was more keen on protecting the identity of donors, the Ministry of Finance’s responses…

India’s Shadow Lobbies: How Business Captured the Government
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India’s Shadow Lobbies: How Business Captured the Government

Divya Guha   It has come to light that according to its profit and loss statement for the quarter ended March 2019, Tata Consultancy Services donated Rs 220 crore to an unnamed beneficiary.   This makes the infotech consultant the single largest political donor.   TCS has outdone Prudent Electoral Trust, which supplied a total…

Sinking MGNREGA
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Sinking MGNREGA

Subodh Varma It would have seemed natural—indeed, imperative—that, as India grapples with a deadly slowdown, with agricultural economy growing only at around 2% and rural joblessness hovering at a shocking 8%, the government would infuse some energy in the implementation of the rural jobs guarantee scheme (MGNREGA). This would put more money in the hands…

9 Million Jobs Lost in 6 Years, a First in Indian History
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9 Million Jobs Lost in 6 Years, a First in Indian History

Courtesy: The Wire A recent working paper published by the Centre for Sustainable Employment, Azim Premji University has contested official claims on employment, showing an “unprecedented” fall in total employment from 2011–12 to 2017–18. Written by Santosh Mehrotra and Jajati K. Parida, the study says employment dropped by 9 million between these years—“for the first…

Dangerous Agreement to Sign
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Dangerous Agreement to Sign

Prabhat Patnaik (This article was written before the Indian government announced that it was not joining the RCEP. It continues to be relevant, as there is enormous pressure on the government to join the trade agreement– Editor.) On October 24–25, there were widespread peasant protests all over the country against the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership…

Impoverished Economics? Unpacking the Economics Nobel Prize
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Impoverished Economics? Unpacking the Economics Nobel Prize

Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven This week it was announced that Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer won the Economics Nobel Prize (or more accurately: the ‘Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel’). The trio of economists were awarded the prize for “their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty”. On social media…

FDI in Coal: Why Our Mineral Resources Should Remain in Public Hands
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FDI in Coal: Why Our Mineral Resources Should Remain in Public Hands

Courtesy: News Click Joan Robinson, the well-known economist, had drawn attention to a fundamental difference between foreign direct investment (FDI) in the manufacturing sector and in a sector that extracted an exhaustible resource, such as a mineral product. This difference can be illustrated with an example. Suppose in both sectors profits worth Rs 100 are…