Bhagwant Mann and Arvind Kejriwal are realising that it is not a cakewalk to run a full state that is plagued with a fiscal deficit and where emotions run high at the drop of a hat, observes Sudhir Bisht.
Any move of the present government to appease the Marathas may boomerang. Eknath Shinde is a worried man with the agitation not having an easy solution, notes Ramesh Menon.
Chief Economic Adviser K V Subramanian on Wednesday said India is expected to hit a growth rate of 6.5-7 per cent in 2022-23 and accelerate further to 8 per cent in the subsequent years on the back of reforms undertaken by the government. He also said the government is expected to meet the fiscal deficit target of 6.8 per cent in the current fiscal despite pressure on revenue collections.
'The BJP's real weapons are Hindutva, organisation and finance.'
Police said they received information that migrant labourers in the Jouria area of Yamunanagar had come out in large numbers violating social distancing and lockdown norms. When police reached there, a few migrants started throwing stones at them. Many factories where the migrants worked are located in the area near which the workers have been putting up during the lockdown.
The unemployment rate shot up to a record 10.9 per cent in the week that ended on December 18, points out Mahesh Vyas.
Senior Congress leader and former finance minister P Chidambaram said the stimulus package has left several sections like the poor, migrants, farmers, labourers, workers, small shopkeepers and middle class high and dry.
The unemployment rate is higher among urban women as was the case before the pandemic.
The World Bank's latest review of its purchasing power parity (PPP) baseline will reignite the poverty debate.
Priyanka Gandhi Vadra tells the women that "Rahul was naughtier than her, but she got the scolding instead".
'I don't need to go out now. I don't have to buy votes. My workers are campaigning for me, visiting villages. I know people in every village and their issues,' says the 78-year-old leader.
The Lok Sabha contest in Thiruvananthapuram is shaping up to be a significant battle involving key candidates like Shashi Tharoor, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, and Panniyan Ravindran. This three-cornered fight highlights the political dynamics in Kerala's capital city, with each candidate bringing their own vision and promises for the region's development, notes Rajeev Srinivasan.
'We will be hoisting the tiranga, but this kind of celebration is uncalled for when the farmers in this country are dying by suicides, their families are ravaged by poverty and farmers are not enjoying any freedom.'
Police have busted a gang conducting a fake T20 cricket tournament in Mehsana Gujarat to take bets from Russian bookies by live streaming the matches and arrested four of its members, an official said on Monday.
Chidambaram said the stimulus package has left several sections like the poor, migrants, farmers, labourers, workers, small shopkeepers and middle class high and dry.
Away from the distraction of its new high-profile politics, Wayanad's worries seemed very down to earth, discovers Shyam G Menon.
Rio also appointed 24 MLAs as 'advisors' to various departments in his opposition less government.
Claims of a spike in poverty and inequality in India during the Covid-19 pandemic are patently false as such claims are based on uncomparable different surveys, according to a paper co-authored by eminent economist Arvind Panagariya. The paper also noted that inequality fell in the country during Covid years, both in rural and urban areas as well as nationally. Panagariya, Columbia University Professor and former vice chairman of NITI Aayog and Vishal More of Intelink Advisors, New Delhi have co-authored a detailed paper 'Poverty and Inequality in India: Before and After Covid-19'.
Shivakumar has got the all-important Major and Medium Irrigation and Bengaluru City Development, including the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), Bangalore Development Authority, Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board, Bangalore Metropolitan Region Development Authority and the Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation Limited.
The round-the-clock operation to rescue a 4-year-old girl who is stuck inside a borewell at Nagathana village near here continued for the third day on Thursday, with rescuers still struggling to reach her.
'The BJP is trying to change this mantra.'
'When the average growth in the last three years was just 2.5%, how does that make us the fastest growing country?' 'They only tell you what has happened in the last 2 years; they are not taking into account what happened in FY21 on account of their mistakes.'
Given the many policy areas where the Centre and the states have not been seeing eye to eye in the last few years, it is time the Modi government convenes a meeting of the Inter-State Council, recommends A K Bhattacharya.
The only real solution to the jobs crisis, whether in India or abroad, is to direct tech innovation towards job enhancing sectors, and disincentivising job-replacing ones, observes R Jagannathan.
Bikers performing stunts. Fibleglass sculpture. Visual artists. White crested black bantam chicken posing for a photo.
The proposed changes to the child labour law to allow children and adolescents to work for their families would be most retrograde and regressive, say Shinzani Jain and Paranjoy Guha Thakurta.
Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad K Sangma retained the key departments for his National Peoples Party, and gave the lesser politically significant ones to alliance partners Bharatiya Janata Party, Hill State Peoples Democratic Party and United Democratic Party as he allocated portfolios on Thursday.
Governments seem to be a lot more wary of imposing a draconian lockdown this time. Some lessons seem to have been learned. So, it may be fair to assume that these lockdowns will do less harm. But they will hurt the recovery process, which is still incomplete, warns Mahesh Vyas.
Whether it was the MGNREGS or the NFSA or the Aadhaar-based DBT scheme for cash transfer, the Modi government has built on the basic architecture created by the Singh government. Policy makers in the Modi government, instead of discarding them as products of the previous political regime, worked on them, expanded their scope and reach, and used new tools to improve their performance, explains A K Bhattacharya.
'Revision of the base year for both CPI and GDP are long overdue.' 'The basic data that went into the 2011-2012 series were mainly from surveys done in 2011 or earlier.' 'We have since seen the emergence of new sectors like platform-based work and online marketing.' 'The employment surveys and the consumption surveys need to reflect these adequately.'
Speaking at the RSS's annual Vijayadashami rally in Nagpur which was broadcast online and attended 50 swayamsevaks (volunteers) due to the COVID-19 guidelines, Bhagwat said when the Sangh says Hindustan is 'Hindu Rashtra', it does not have any political or power-centered concept in its mind.
'The economic impact of this lockdown is evidently huge.' 'Its impact on the livelihood of vulnerable sections of the society is immeasurably bigger,' observes Mahesh Vyas.
'The China opportunity, the digital opportunity and the end of geography opportunity are the three pieces of luck India got due to Covid.'
5G ambulances will not just allow remote consultation, but would also be able to transit data and video to hospitals in real time, saving precious time for critical patients. 5G technology would also support the development of new educational applications, improve agriculture productivity, and aid search and rescue missions with high resolution cameras in disaster recovery zones.
The cumulative loss of salaried jobs since the pandemic is even larger at 12.6 million, reveals Mahesh Vyas.
The forthcoming budget needs to delay fiscal consolidation, instead should focus more on supporting the pandemic battered-economy and boost consumption demand by offering income tax soaps and cutting fuel taxes, says a report. In a pre-budget report, India Ratings said it expects the new budget to consolidate and strengthen the plan set out in the last budget, rather than trying out new things by continue with the revenue and capital expenditure pattern of FY'22 to provide stability and consolidation to the past/ongoing efforts, and to focus on boosting demand by generating employment opportunities in areas/sectors that have been impacted more by the pandemic. The report therefore expects the finance minister to delay fiscal consolidation and make it to be a gradual and calibrated process, thus ensuring the necessary fiscal support that the economy needs is available till the recovery acquires its own momentum.
But use of that word -- privatisation -- is not encouraged. This seems to be a classic case of reforms through subtle signals, observes A K Bhattacharya.
The country's economy will start witnessing a growth of 6.5 to 7 per cent from fiscal 2023 onwards, helped by various reforms undertaken by the government so far and also as COVID-19 vaccination drive progresses, Chief Economic Advisor Krishnamurthy Subramanian said. He said the second wave of COVID-19 is unlikely to have a very significant on the economy. The country's economy contracted by 7.3 per cent in fiscal 2020-21. "Together with the reforms and focus on vaccination, I expect growth to start hitting close 6.5 to 7 per cent from FY23 onwards and accelerate from there on," Subramanian said at a virtual event organised by Dun & Bradstreet.
At least 16 labourers were killed while eight were injured when a construction material laden truck they had boarded overturned in Andhra Pradesh's East Godavari district on Monday.
BRS spokesperson Sravan Dasoju, speaking to PTI, expressed confidence KCR would win from both the constituencies with a thumping majority.