The Policy Monitor
A recent study by the Association Chamber of Commerce and Industry of India estimated that the hundreds of thousands of Indian students now studying abroad cost India as much as US $17 billion a year in revenue. As a result, Indians end up contributing to their host country more than their home country.
Should ‘Smart India’ carry forward the burden of ‘Unsmart Agriculture’, how long?
Probably, time has come to abandon the dream project ‘Doubling Farmers Income’ by 2022, launched 7 years ago, which appears a far cry! Better, initiate exercise to pay remunerative price to farmers having rationality to MRP and closer to price charged from consumers.
The principle-based approach of the positive duties of the Indian state has benefited its large population of poor and marginalized, it has also shifted focus from creating agency for the disadvantaged to limiting the discussion to the quality of public service delivery.
Poverty is multidimensional and thus the concept of it has to be extended beyond the deprivation of income; not only extended to the deprivation of basic necessities such as food, clothing and shelter or access to social securities of health and education, but also to the deprivation of freedom (such as political freedom) or social acceptance.
The RBI has surprised the markets by this strong move towards policy sequencing of inflation containment prior to economic growth in the recent MPC meetings. Since May 2020, indeed the policy imperative of RBI has been “whatever it takes” to tackle the economic growth recovery process. However, with the war in Ukraine and mounting inflationary pressures, price stability has become the significant concern for RBI. The ever-mutating coronavirus would continue as a crucial determinant of macroeconomic uncertainties.
While we have seen continuous increase in expenditure in clean energy over the past years (2021 alone saw the biggest jump yet of 27% in investment in low carbon energy compared to 2020) ,the urgency to achieve the net-zero target is yet to translate into large increases in spending on clean energy projects.
There is an inherent danger of economic mismanagement in populism, and the ongoing Sri Lankan crisis proves the argument. Gotayba Rajapaksa’s presidency is marked by successive disastrous economic policy decisions ranging from tax cuts, freebies, and anti-modern policies such as the ban on chemical fertilizers, so on and so forth.
Natural Farming, as the name suggests, is the art, practice and, increasingly, the science of working with nature to achieve much more with less. It relies more on soil biology than soil chemistry by encouraging multi cropping, round-the-year soil cover, addition of formulation made up of cow dung and urines to trigger the microorganisms in the soil system.
Reliance Industries (RIL), Future Retail and Amazon have been embroiled in an unyielding corporate struggle for over two years now. The dynamically changing developments afflicting this saga indicate just how large the stakes are in this game with each party trying to take the biggest bite out of the pie that is the Indian retail segment.
We are nearly seven years into the 2015 Paris Accord where the world came together and decided that we have to put a stop to the rising temperatures at 1.5 degrees of pre industrial levels, and we are already at 1.1 degrees. If the above statement is anything to go by, I would think it’s a safe, but heart-wrenching assumption that we will fail to effectively restrict the rise in temperatures.