India’s flirtation with socialism from the time of Independence contributed to massive suffering of its people. But over much of the past decades, politicians found it easier to blame their own citizens for bearing too many children rather than reject a failed ideology. Unfortunately, foreigners were only too eager to promote the ugly lie of over-population. [...]
Attempts by the Food Corporation of India (FCI) to mop up some of the bumper harvest of food grains that rose from 232 mt last year to 253 mt this year have caused distortions in the private market for jute bags. While the FCI scrambles to buy jute bags to store grain, private dealers of [...]
Government! Three fourths parasitic & the other fourth stupid fumbling — oh, he conceded that man, a social animal, could not avoid having government, any more than an individual man could escape his lifelong bondage to his bowels. But Harshaw did not have to like it. Simply because an evil was inescapable was no reason [...]
According to data from the World Bank, India’s GDP is about $1.7 trillion or 2.79% of the world economy, making it the 11th largest economy when calculated at market exchange rates. Data from the World Gold Council (WGC) indicate that Indians are the largest holder of gold with about 18,000 tonnes or about 11% of [...]
According to the International Food Policy Research Institute’s 2011 Global Hunger Index, India ranked 67th out of 81 countries & had 200 million “food-insecure” people, the most of any country. A convincing case can be made that policy interventions are the underlying cause for India’s problem with hunger & starvation. To help my students remember [...]
Several government interventions like the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, Mid Day Meal, and the District Primary Education Program have resulted in increasing the net enrolment rate into primary school. Despite a high primary net enrolment rate of 91% (WDI, 2008), more than 5.5 million children are still out of school in India and of those enrolled [...]
Moves by Finance Minister Mukherjee are bemusing, to say the least. Indeed. it is not uncharitable to wonder if the Ministry is lacking individuals with a grasp on basic economics. As it is, no one seemed to consider the impact on recent policies announcement on tax revenues needed to offset the large fiscal deficit or [...]
Centre for Civil Society’s very own Bhuvana Anand has published a piece in the New York Times International Weekly summarizing the big issues and contradictions in current Indian policy and political philosophy. “After the release of the latest round of data from India’s 2011 census report, I was asked why India had so many cellphones and not enough [...]
“When order is achieved among human beings by allowing them to interact with each other on their own initiative – subject only to the laws which universally apply to all of them – we have a system of spontaneous order in society.’”
According to the Harvard Gazette, “Esther Duflo, a development economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said during the year’s first Tanner Lecture on Wednesday that the world’s rich prosper in part because they have less freedom to choose how to attain basic comforts.” This is flimflam. Part of what Duflo is pointing to is certainly [...]
