Government must create jobs, not just offer cash: renowned Indian economist Chaitanya Kalbag, Contributing Writer NEW DELHI — Narendra Modi’s government unveiled an ambitious budget last week with huge handouts for India’s poor, a move that could certainly win him votes in the upcoming elections but will do little to alleviate poverty in the long…
The truth is, India isn’t rich enough to be a welfare state William Safire must be turning in his grave. The language maven and Richard Nixon speechwriter came up with the ‘nattering nabobs of negativism” phrase that US Vice- President Spiro Agnew used in a 1970 speech. Finance minister Arun Jaitley first used ‘nawabs of…
Chaitanya Kalbag The ‘poverty line’ is assumed to be consumption of Rs 65 per capita per month in rural areas and Rs 75 in urban areas at 1977-78 prices. On this basis in 1977-78, 306 million people in India were living below the ‘poverty line’, of whom 249 million were in rural areas and 57…
We are hopefully in the last of this summer’s dog days, and Sirius (or Svana as it is known in Hindu astrology) will glow a little less brilliantly in the hot night sky. Dog days are said to induce all sorts of mental upheaval, agitation, and unpleasantness. Perhaps that is why much of Europe wisely…
Chaitanya Kalbag Poor Manmohan Singh is caught between the Pros and the Cons. The Pros in the Opposition are telling the prime minister, who has never seemed sullied by money politics, that he should be resigning. The Congress, led by A. Raja, is telling him that he is allegedly complicit in the 2G scandal. The…