Thames Water, one of England's many regional water monopolies, infamously privatised by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s and symbolising the dramatic turn in economic policy that neoliberalism implied, is finally collapsing.

A spike in Overseas Development Assistance flows from OECD members is not a departure from a long history of ODA levels that have fallen far short of a 1970 promise. It is a revelation of what "aid" really is.

The India Employment Report points to worrying tendencies in terms of structural change in the Indian economy, especially in recent years.

There is a paradox at the core of the efflorescence of science that has occurred over the last millennium. In essence this efflorescence has the potential to increase human freedom immensely.

Even though the latest consumption survey is not comparable with earlier surveys, and the full data have not yet been released, some preliminary results point to significant inequality in consumption.

Indian federalism is on the verge of breakdown. Ministers from opposition-ruled States have taken to the streets in New Delhi to protest against discrimination by the Centre.

In The Junius Pamphlet written from jail in 1915, Rosa Luxemburg had said that the choice before mankind was between barbarism and socialism. Liberal opinion would contest this, arguing that the barbarism that marked the two world wars and the period in between was unrelated to capitalism;

The unemployment situation is worse today than it has ever been in post-independence India. There are two distinct elements that have contributed to this situation. One is the fact that the output recovery from the fall caused by the pandemic-linked lockdown has not been accompanied by a comparable employment recovery.

On January 10, the IMF announced its decision to release $4.7 billion out of a $57 billion bailout package sanctioned in 2018 to perennially debt-distressed Argentina, then under a right-wing government headed by Mauricio Macrio.

The significance of Lenin’s Imperialism lay in the fact that it totally revolutionised the perception of the revolution. Marx and Engels had already visualised the possibility of colonial and dependent countries having revolutions of their own even before the proletarian revolution in the metropolis.

The recent collapse of the protracted negotiations to restructure Zambia's external debt, following a default in November 2020, underlines the failure of the prevailing international financial architecture to address global challenges.

A significant part of the recent increase in work participation rates is actually because of more unpaid workers being included in the category of "employed". The true increase in paid employment is marginal, and still bellow the rates of more than a decade ago.

Imperialist hegemony over the third world is exercised not just through arms and economic might but also through the hegemony of ideas, by making the victims see the world the way imperialism wants them to see it.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had witnessed the emergence of two different paradigms of colonialism: the first, of which India was the classic example, involved the conquest of countries which had had a history of established central administrations.

Significant segments of the non-Communist Western Left see the developing contradiction between the United States and China in terms of an inter-imperialist rivalry.

All fascistic outfits have one common characteristic: they reject outright all evidence that goes against the narrative they spin; and the Hindutva elements in power in India are no exception.

In response to the attack by Hamas on October 7, Israeli forces have not only pounded the Gaza strip with massive bombing, killing nearly 2000 Palestinians and wounding at least 7000 (till Friday night), but have cut off all supplies of food, electricity, gas and water to Gaza.

India has a robust and admired statistical system. But the government is suppressing data to suit its narrative. It is perilous not to know the reality of the governed.

The current upsurge in prices in India is led by food prices. In July 2023 while retail inflation was 7.44 per cent (over July of the previous year), food price inflation, which covers all food items including foodgrains, vegetables, milk products and such like, was 11.5 per cent.

Much of the ex-colonial world, having set up dirigiste regimes to wrest control over its natural resources from metropolitan capital and to build up industries behind protectionist walls, was sought to be re-assimilated into imperialist hegemony through the neo-liberal economic order; but in one segment of this world decolonisation itself was never completed.

Many economists have been advocating a universal basic income for India, an idea that was mooted even in the official Economic Survey for 2016-17.

Without urgent and effective action on debt relief, fiscal pressures of debt service will cause low and middle income countries to regress on important social and economic indicators.

Nothing, not even Hindenburg Research, seems to stop the advance of Indian big business. The Adani Group continues with its acquisitions, even if at a slower pace, and has been able to persuade financial markets to lend it more money, notwithstanding assessments that it is over-dependent on debt.

Fascistic elements exist in every modern society, but usually as fringe, marginal or minor elements. They move centre-stage only when they get the support of monopoly capital which provides them with ample money and media coverage; and this happens when there is a capitalist crisis that substantially increases unemployment.

Apprehensions by India and other countries of possible excesses in capital inflows and the inflationary impacts led them stiffen the domestic interest rates. The Fed, however has reversed its policy to meet domestic inflation by pitching the US Fed interest rate high.

In the past few years, global wheat prices have moved far away from "fundamentals" of demand and supply. This can be explained by other factors like market concentration and financial activity in commodities markets, which take advantage of temporary or perceived supply shocks.

After Sri Lanka and Pakistan, Bangladesh has become the third country in our neighbourhood to become afflicted by a serious economic crisis. It has asked for a $4.5 billion loan from the IMF, apart from $1 billion from the World Bank and $2.5-3 billion from multilateral agencies and donor nations.

Making the global food system more sustainable and equitable represents a huge and complex undertaking that necessarily involves difficult trade-offs. The tension between responding to short-term increases in fertilizer prices and implementing long-term strategies for combating climate change is a case in point.

Official survey data on employment suggest that recent processes of rural employment diversification could already be reversing because of the lack of other viable employment opportunities beyond farming.

Many economists these days talk of a process of "de-globalisation" taking place; some others talk of the neoliberal regime of yesteryears no longer existing.

Most people, including even trained economists, fail to appreciate the fact that an exchange rate depreciation, if it is to work in reducing the trade deficit in a capitalist economy, must necessarily hurt the working class by lowering the real wage rate.

A New York Times News Service report reproduced in The Telegraph of Kolkata (May 7), discusses the findings of a global public opinion survey carried out by the Bennett Institute of Public Policy of Cambridge University.

In her 2022 book, The Making of a Catastrophe (Aleph), on the disastrous economic fallout of COVID-19, Indian development economist Jayati Ghosh writes that job losses and food insecurity were significantly higher for women.

For a large part of the dirigiste period, the gross domestic product of the Indian economy grew at a rate of around 4 per cent per annum or less, which, though an improvement compared to the colonial era that had witnessed virtual stagnation, was not very impressive.

There is an overwhelming asymmetry between the level of "development" and the possession of natural resources among countries of the world. Take the group of most advanced countries, the G-7 comprising the US, the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Japan and Canada.

It comes close to a fairytale as one starts narrating the meteoric rise and fall of the Adani Group in terms of its changing fortunes or valuations in the market.

There is an impression shared by even progressive intellectuals that the entity that goes by the name of “physical infrastructure” is an absolute necessity in each country, and that the actual amount of infrastructure that exists is always less than what is needed.

Recently, a three-judge Bench of the Supreme Court put forth the idea of setting up an expert committee that could recommend ways to protect common investors from market events.

Over the past two decades, Indian multi-billionaire Gautam Adani's close ties to Prime Minister Narendra Modi have helped the Gujarati businessman become Asia's wealthiest person.

A strike on the Adani group by short-seller the U.S.-based Hindenburg Research has led to the unravelling of the Gautam Adani story, which celebrated the spectacular rise, in an extremely short period of time, of the wealth of a man and his business empire.

Gautam Adani's calling Hindenburg's allegations of fraud against him an attack on the Indian nation is a matter of particular significance. Just before this episode, the BBC documentary on Modi had been labelled a product of the colonial mindset by the government and hence also construed to be an attack on the Indian nation.

Economic theory makes much of "rent goods". A "rent good" is one whose supply cannot be augmented at will, simply through investing more on its production; its supply is subject to constraints imposed by nature, because of which there is a certain maximum rate of long-run growth which is exogenously given and cannot be altered at will.

All regimes based on class antagonism require a discourse to legitimise class oppression and this discourse in turn requires a vocabulary of its own. The neoliberal regime too has developed its own discourse and vocabulary and a key concept in this vocabulary is "populism".

Tight monetary policies in rich countries obviously affect people in the countries where they are applied, but they also cause ripple effects across the world. We were already in a very unequal world before the most recent global price increases.

The IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva has now openly admitted that the year 2023 will witness the slowing down of the world economy to a point where as much as one-third of it will see an actual contraction in gross domestic product.

The preponderance of the self-employed in the labour force in many countries makes conventional schemes for ensuring social protection impossible to implement. Innovative ways of ensuring a universal social protection floor are required.

The hegemony of imperialism is invariably associated with an agrarian crisis in countries of the global south; in fact agrarian crisis is just the other side of the ascendancy of imperialism. This is evident from the case of Indian agriculture.

The fact that income and wealth inequalities have increased quite dramatically under the neo-liberal regime is beyond dispute. The empirical work by Piketty’s team bears out the increase in income inequality. They use income tax data to infer about the share of the top 1 per cent of the population of a country in its national income.

As COP27, the climate summit at Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt, ended after a being prolonged, assessments of what it achieved were mixed. But the overwhelming sense was that the summit had yielded little, since on most counts it had not gone beyond the pledges agreed to at COP26 held in Glasgow last year and incorporated in the Glasgow Climate Pact.

A Neo-liberal regime entails a spontaneous change in the balance of class power against the working class everywhere. This happens for a number of reasons. First, since capital becomes globally mobile while labour is not, such globally mobile capital gets an opportunity to pit the working class of one country against that of another.

Economics is a subject where the ruling classes are forever trying to promote ideologically-motivated explanations in lieu of scientific ones. These explanations of course can be, and have been, fitted into an integrated totality of an alternative non-scientific theoretical structure that Marx had called "vulgar economy" as distinct from classical political economy.

The triumph of the City of London, the one square kilometre next to Liverpool Street station that houses the citadel of British finance, is complete. Not only did it get rid of one British prime minister, whom it distrusted, in the space of just 44 days, but even got a new one of its choice installed forthwith.

The Global Hunger Index (GHI) for 2022 has just come out, which shows India occupying the 107th position among the 121 countries for which the index is prepared (countries where hunger is not a noteworthy problem are left out of the index).

The estimates of Gross Domestic Product for the April-June quarter released by the government on August 31 paint a dismal picture of the Indian economy. Since the GDP in real terms (at 2011-12 prices) shows an increase of 13.5 per cent over the first quarter GDP a year ago, and since 13.5 per cent appears an impressive figure, official spokespersons have been putting a cheerful gloss over it.

The rush of sovereign bondholders to less developed countries was seen as an opportunity by many governments. But increased dependence on those bonds has not only contributed to a debt crisis but made resolution near impossible.

Economists distinguish between two kinds of inflation: "demand-pull" and "cost-push". Demand-pull inflation is said to occur when there is excess demand in a situation where supply cannot be augmented, because full capacity output has been reached in one or more crucial sectors.

India's enforcement directorate, still preoccupied with unearthing corruption and money laundering among opposition politicians, has decided to turn its attention to those involved in the crypto business in the country as well.

A Bizarre drama is unfolding in front of our eyes. The Modi government which has been giving away hundreds of thousands of crores of rupees as tax concessions to the monopolists has expressed its opposition ironically to what it calls "freebies", that is to handing over subsidies to other segments of the population.

At the end of the five-year period in which states were being compensated for shortfalls in GST revenues relative to targets, they are on the verge of a fiscal crisis. That could spell the end of the GST regime.

Exchange rates have behaved very differently from what many pundits predicted at the start of the Ukraine war. This requires careful reconsideration of the various factors that determine their movement.

India is experiencing a job market crisis. Applicants for preferred jobs outnumber vacancies by numbers that make the process a lottery. The qualifications of these applicants far exceed the skills or knowledge required by many jobs.

All is not quiet on India's external economic front. The rupee seems to be on a trajectory of accelerating decline, with its value relative to the dollar (as per the Reserve Bank of India's reference rate) falling from Rs. 76.4 at the beginning of April to Rs. 79.1 at the beginning of July.

Over the last three years the Indian rupee has experienced continuous decline, with bouts of sharp depreciation influenced by multiple factors but led principally by capital outflows.

When the COVID pandemic affected every one of the world's nations, the way forward seemed obvious, even if difficult to traverse. Given the rapid spread of the disease and its severity that overwhelmed long neglected health systems, and the cost to lives and livelihoods that shutdowns of economic and social activity implied, quick access to drugs and vaccines to manage the pandemic were crucial.

The meltdown in May 2022 in the cryptocurrency world, in which the values of digital coins plunged and rendered some near-worthless, is a wake-up call. It once again shows that cryptocurrencies are nothing but a bunch of insubstantial, digital 'bits' created by speculators as 'coins' for speculation.

The FAO's recent wheat production and utilization forecasts indicate that the focus on the war in Ukraine as the sole driver of explosive global price trends is misplaced and ill-advised.

Adam Smith and David Ricardo had been haunted by the idea of capitalism ending up in a "stationary state", by which they meant a stable state of zero growth. Marx used the term "simple reproduction" to describe such a state, where there is no net addition to production capacity and the economy just reproduces itself at the same level period after period.

In the five days ending March 26, petrol and diesel prices in the country had been hiked four times, with more such daily hikes in the offing. On each occasion the hike had been by 80 paise per litre, so that the total increase during the week had been Rs 3.20 per litre, bringing the price per litre of petrol to Rs 98.61 and of diesel to Rs 89.87 in the capital city, Delhi.

The relocation of capital from the advanced capitalist countries of the north to low- wage countries of the south in the current era of globalisation has received much attention; but there is another kind of relocation that has not received as much attention, and that is of labour from comparatively lower-wage countries of Eastern Europe to the advanced capitalist countries.

A crucial component of the imperialist system is the colonisation of third world minds. It incapacitates critical thinking on how to solve social problems. A critical component of this colonisation is a narrative about social development that insulates colonialism or imperialism as causal factors.

Education in independent India was supposed to build organic intellectuals; therefore, its curriculum should be rooted in the reality of the country and not imitative of the metropolis. But the exact opposite is happening under neoliberal globalization and the Modi government's NEP further advances the homogenization of education.

The UAPA is a blot on the nation. In no civilized nation can the State pick up literally anybody and imprison them for years without trial or bail; and if the person is found innocent, there is no question of the State being obliged to compensate them for their lost years. This is exactly what the UAPA does.

The sudden nation-wide lockdown implemented on March 24, 2020 brought acute hardship to millions of the working poor; no compensation was offered to the people for their loss in livelihoods and they were pushed into a situation of income loss, destitution and hunger.

An official survey reveals how education spending has gone up sharply in India, forming a huge financial burden on households and excluding the majority of the population from higher education.

NEP involves a paradigm shift in India’s education system that is highly retrograde and deleterious. It visualizes an education that is in perfect sync with the politics of the corporate-Hindutva alliance that currently rules India.

Prabhat Patnaik in his interview with Subho-ranjan Dasgupta says that Hindutva is a vote-catching device, it works essentially to further the interests of big capital, both domestic and foreign.

The current crisis in capitalism is not because of the pandemic, but due to the operation of neoliberalism that increased the share of economic surplus in output by keeping the real wage rates unchanged, even while labour productivity increased. The existence of an over-production crisis predating the pandemic has only made things worse.

The Hindu Rastra, that the BJP wants to achieve, will eventually be an authoritarian State, suppressing Hindus and Muslims alike and eventually subjecting them to unprecendented levels of exploitation by international finance capital and domestic corporate-financial oligarchy.

The current central government does not feel the need to follow the practice of releasing prisoners, thus displaying a tremendous disregard for human rights. Most of the detainees, who are being held in the coronavirus infected jails, have not been convicted of any crime and are innocent citizens; many are even senior citizens with severe comorbidities, which makes them extremely vulnerable.

The National Education Policy portrays the objectives of a neo-liberal education policy that aims to educate people merely on the basis required by capital, by excluding the socially and economically deprived section from the ambit of education, while encouraging privatization of education.

India has been a world leader in economic disparities and social discrimination for a while and the pandemic policy response proves that some lives are much cheaper than others.

The contrast in responses to the BLM movement in the U.S. and the anti-CAA anti-NRC protests in India has to do with the fact that the “educated bourgeoisie” in the U.S. has been more punctilious in playing a democratic role than its Indian counterparts.

Amidst a dreadful pandemic, the medical staff of several government facilities are facing salary cut. As healthcare gets more privatized, the State's actions seem to compound the rapid increase in absolute poverty by keeping public health expenditure abysmally low.

In a three-dimensional crisis, of migrants, of pandemic and of the Indian Economy, the sudden visibiliy of migrants is due to the threat they pose to public health. What remains to be seen is whether the voice of the most vulnerable section will be heard or not.

Denial of food is a very potent weapon in the imperialist armoury and every step in the direction of opening agriculture to global trade is ipso facto a step towards reducing domestic food availability.

Prof. Jayati Ghosh talks with Number13 about India’s response to the pandemic and its myriad impacts on society. It is not Covid-19 itself, but the highly classist government responses which have destroyed the economy, employment and livelihood of the country.

An account of hunger and destitution currently experienced by the mass of out-migrants in urban pockets, provide clear indications of a minimalist state in the process. Closer alliance of big capital and the ruling state further weaken the prevailing labour laws under the false pretext of attracting finance.

The lockdown has disrupted the livelihoods of many people in India, but compensations have not been announced till date. The payment made to private sector employees from public budgets is simply a recognition of the rights of individuals within a capitalist democracy, where the poor have no de facto rights.

Lack of planning and preparation by the Central government for tackling the COVID-19 pandemic has dealt a massive blow to India’s rural economy, causing enormous hardships to working people and further aggravating food insecurity in the country.

The dead-end of neoliberalism, which is visible to even bourgeois thinkers in the metropolis now, is invisible to the Modi government still on the authoritarian-fascist track. Even the revival of post-war "welfare capitalism" will require a struggle by the working class.

By suspending labour laws in an undemocratic manner, states are exploiting the unique opportunity provided by the national lockdown. It is time we wake up to its authoritarian rule and resist unitedly.

The brutal suspension of labour laws will not help attract private investment, or raise overall levels of profits. It will, however, lead to a reduction in employment and output for the economy as a whole.

The plan of some state governments to dilute labour laws in order to attract investment is not just ethically vile but economically stupid.

Images of migrants walking hundreds of kilometers to return home are showing the extent of the government’s indifference to the lives of millions. The almost complete privatization of social reproduction in India has left its legacy in the large-scale malnourishment that makes our population uniquely vulnerable to the coronavirus.

To face of a pandemic created by globalization under the aegis of capitalism, most countries are taking a socialist turn. Global economic and humanitarian crises like these suggest an end-game for the free-market system.

The relief package announced by the Finance Minister is a niggardly response to an unprecedented health, economic, and humanitarian crisis, severely affecting both demand and supply. The Centre does not seem interested in moving much beyond the lockdown.

State policies to deal with the economic fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic tend to address financial losses of companies. But the material impact is much worse for informal workers who constitute the bulk of the global workforce.

It is clear from the current pandemic that the tenets of neo-liberalism must be reversed to introduce a comprehensive public healthcare system and a universal public distribution system; otherwise several precious lives will be lost.

The production setback triggered by the coronavirus epidemic in China will soon be fed by countries turning propagators. Prospects of deep recession now seem daunting as the fragility of neo-liberalism is revealed.

The term "populism" which was used by the Left to refer to a perspective that saw the "people" as undifferentiated in class terms, has been transformed. It now is used as a concept that underplays the viciousness of Right-wing supremacism.

The recent labour force survey points to declines in all forms of work performed by women, including unpaid labour! Women are the worst casualties of the employment crisis in India.

Since the building of a democratic society requires keeping wealth inequalities in check, the need for substantial inheritance taxes cannot be denied even by bourgeois theory. Lack of any such provision only signifies the bad faith of our governments.

In an interview with The Hindu, Jayati Ghosh talks about her life experiences, her views about global economic slowdown and the role of fiscal deficit in resolving demand scarcity, and the importance of JNU within a system of crony capitalism.

Recently released NSS data and administrative data on LPG connections show that most LPG connections provided under the PMUY may not have reached intended beneficiaries. Survey data confirms that half of the rural households continue to use firewood, chips, crop residue and dung cakes as the main fuel.

The NSS Report No 584, based on the 76th Round survey, calls the bluff peddled by the government on the achievements of Swachh Bharat Mission. In 2018, when the government was claiming that only 1.7 per cent rural households did not have latrines, the survey shows that it as many as 28.7 per cent.

Leaked data showing a drop in per capita consumer expenditure confirms the massive downturn in the Indian economy. The suppression of such valuable survey data on unjustified grounds of "poor data quality" shows the governments' megalomania.

In 2015, United Nations member states adopted the Sustainable Development Goals, which include an imperative to "ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all." Yet, in the last four years, matters have deteriorated significantly.

The Modi government's "stimulus" measure in the form of corporate tax concessions will aggravate the slowdown instead of overcoming it and worsen in India.

Staying out of the RCEP is the best option for India. While damaging for some sectors, the terms would preclude measures required to raise India's export competitiveness.

Sops in the form of corporate tax cuts will only temporarily stimulate the stock market, and will not do anything to reverse the tendencies for the stagnation in the Indian economy.

Increased public expenditure in social sectors financed by progressive taxation is the solution to India's poor human development and its current economic growth slowdown.

Demonetisation further added to the problems of Indian banking in the medium term.

The ailing Indian economy has concerns that goes beyond GDP growth and the plunging financial sector.

Marx saw the necessary incompatibility between capitalism and human freedom: a contradiction that is becoming all too evident today.

The recent measures announced by the Finance Minister to reverse the economic slowdown do not address the basic problem of inadequate demand in the Indian economy.

Growth optimism about the Indian economy and the post-election speculative boom in the stock market are reversing because the perceptions on which they were built are now proving wrong.

Ending Kashmir's special status and repealing Article 35 A will not lead to "development" or increase in employment; instead, more crime associated with land speculation and rising terrorism will make prospects bleaker.

While the government was busy celebrating cosmetic measures like 'ease of doing business' ranking, the real economy tanked.

Karnataka is the latest instance of the commoditization of politics in India. This can only change with pressure from the masses based on genuinely alternative politics.

Aggregate employment contracted by 1.2 million between 2011-12 and 2017-18, because of the decline in agricultural employment and slow-down in the non-agricultural job growth.

New flow-of-funds data point not to a change in financing pattern of the corporate sector but to the depressed investment environment in the economy.

Prabhat Patnaik explains the reasons for the declining strength of the Left in India and suggests what the Left should do to revive itself.

Prabhat Patnaik points out that while the debate over inequality has become hotter elsewhere in the world, in India, there is very little noise about it despite a massive rise in inequality after economic liberalisation.

C.P. Chandrasekhar examines "Libra"- the cryptocurrency launched by Facebook - and discusses the dangers associated with control of a widely used currency by for-profit oligopolies.

Prabhat Patnaik argues that, other than for a few years, the Indian economy has not really performed much better after liberalization compared to before: the output growth rate scarcely moved up, while unemployment and inequality worsened.

As the current government withholds the official employment data, Prabhat Patnaik uses per capita cereal availability to show that poverty and unemployment are likely to have worsened in the Modi years.

Prabhat Patnaik argues that the NYAY scheme of the Congress is a form of "charity" rather than establishing an economic right to decent living conditions. But in the current neo-liberal regime, any transfers to the poor are welcome, as long as they do not involve cuts in other social spending.

Prabhat Patnaik argues that rolling back of fascification of our society requires much more than the defeat of the Hindutva forces in the coming elections; it requires above all a programme that provides relief to the people from the depredations of neo-liberal capitalism.

Prabhat Patnaik argues that wealth tax and inheritance tax, even if levied only on dollar billionaires in India, will be sufficient to finance the creation of a welfare state in India in which every citizen will enjoy basic economic rights.

Jayati Ghosh points out that "mainstream economics has operated in the service of power", which has made the subject less relevant and reduced its legitimacy and credibility. Economics needs to become more open to criticism of assumptions, methods, and results.

In a period of upsurge of fascism, narrow nationalism and parochialism, Issa Shivji calls for the social responsibility of intellectuals to construct a counter-hegemonic project that would resonate with the lives of the vast majority.

Income support through 'universal basic income' has to be in addition to the existing welfare schemes and not replace these schemes. The expansion of public delivery of good quality basic services remains essential.

Constraints imposed by the FRBM Act on fiscal and revenue deficit are just an excuse used by the government to hide its unwillingness to act on urgent and important public issues like employment crisis. In reality, government constantly cheats on the FRBM Act, through increased "off-budget" expenditures, misstatement of receipts, and holding back payments that pushes the debt onto other entities.

Attempts by the Modi government to avoid scrutiny on employment generation by suspending or delaying official statistics and trying to use inappropriate and unreliable indicators are bound to fail. Independent assessments point to the dismal job situation in the country.

The government's desire to use RBI’s reserve is based on the erroneous theoretical understanding. This faulty formulation results from the need to avoid upsetting global finance

Neither the union budget nor the National Health Policy 2017 presents any clear and convincing health sector road map. If it is serious about providing health care to even bottom 40% of the population, not only should the government increase its current budgetary allocation substantially but also strengthen the health infrastructure at all levels including a strong regulatory mechanism.

Even the vaguely "pink" effort in the Economic Survey is whitewashed in the finance minister's Budget speech that is heavily based on stereotypical gender roles for women, and even that completely disappears when we get to the actual budget allocations.

On November 30th, the Central Statistical Office (CSO) came out with quarterly estimates of GDP for the second quarter (June to Sep) of 2017. Predictably, analysts and spokespersons of the government spent the evening in newsrooms of various TV channels celebrating what they claimed was a sign of revival of the economy.

The Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba creates a startling sales record on this year’s Singles’ Day, tapping into the rising consumerism of the upper middle class. The surge may not yield the home market growth needed to rebalance the country’s growth.

Why is neoliberalism bad for India and Nepal? What are its major flaws? Mahabir Paudyal and Prashant Lamichhane from myRepublica caught up with Professor CP Chandrasekhar when he was in Kathmandu last week to discuss the impact of neo-liberal economic order in the two countries, and the prospects of a socialist-oriented economy in Nepal.

The German thinker Wolfgang Streeck in his brilliant book provides a cogent critique of the nature of contemporary capitalism, and describes its ongoing extended demise without surrendering to any optimism that as it fails to deliver even in terms of its own logic all the injustice it has generated must inevitably change for the better.

In the light of rescinding, at the behest of the clout of jewellery traders, the notification requiring KYC details for purchase of gold, the government will find it difficult to maintain its 'pro-poor' and 'anti-corruption' image as its moves seem to be, more for optics and hype than substantive change.

Neo-liberal capitalism is marked by the hegemony of international finance capital which has many consequences, among which is the alarming upsurge of fascism, differing markedly from the fascism of the 1930s.

To describe the present upsurge of fascism as nationalist or populist would be misleading. Neither is it a replication of the fascism of the 1930s. However, it is marked by four features, which have been common to all fascist upsurges in the past, namely: rise of supremacism, apotheosis of unreason, proliferation of fascism as a movement, and intertwining of fascist movement and corporate capital.

The failure of digitisation is the result of the Central government's cart-before-horse attitude to policy, which does not take into account the wider context and the supportive and enabling conditions that must be met for any policy measure to succeed.

The conclusion drawn by Piketty and Chancel in their recent paper shows a greater income inequality in India than it has ever been in the past century. But what stands out is that the trend perfectly synchronizes with transition to neo-liberalism, a stage of capitalism wherein international finance has gained hegemony, and no longer remains a policy choice.

By introducing the opaque and hugely problematic system of electoral bonds, the BJP-led government at the Centre has indicated that it is not really interested in fighting corruption but only concerned with expanding its hold on power.

Kisans of Sikar have fought many valiant struggles against oppression and against anti-people state policies. This year's struggle in Sikar has once again shown that it is only through such mobilisations of working people that anti-people actions of the current government can be checked.

In a situation where the secular political leadership has lost a good deal of its credibility and "grassroots vigilantism" is becoming a widespread, veritable epidemic under growing fascism, the judiciary continues to remain a credible instrument for the reassertion of the values that the Constitution associated with a "modern" India.

Deras, like the Pentecostal Church in the U.S. and elsewhere, are popular because they address the needs and aspirations of those socially excluded by organised religion and economically marginalised by globalisation.

The article is highly relevant to the ongoing peasant struggle in Rajasthan (Sikar) today. It examines the historical evidence that shows that the emergence of economically and politically dominant landlords from among Jat, and to a smaller extent Brahmin, castes in Shekhawati is a relatively recent phenomenon. Peasant struggles in Shekhawati in the first half of the twentieth century brought an end to the shackles of the Jagirdari system, which fundamentally changed the structure of control over land with tenants-at-will getting ownership rights over land.

The deeply entrenched casteist approach to manual scavenging is part of public policy and explains why the practice continues unabated and why the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan in effect relies on it.

While the turn of the U.S. towards fascism is unmistakable, the contradictions associated with this turn, and the complexity of the process of formation of the partnership between big business and fascist upstarts within the framework of a non-fascist bourgeois State to start with, are also clearly visible.

After 150 years of 'Das Kapital', the seminal work of the 19th century economist still provides a framework for understanding contemporary capitalism. The unique social relations such as "free labour" and "commodity fetishism", that according to Marx, define capital, are reflected in the uneven and unstable development of the world market.

The central governments' Draft National Education Policy promotes privatization of education to meet its target, which is not only logically absurd but also legitimizes inequality. Solutions like student loans are impractical with educated unemployment, and fee subsidies turn counterproductive. The one efficient way is to extract the private funds through progressive direct tax, but that seems impossible in this neo-liberal era.

The G20 summit in Hamburg was an occasion for public affirmations of the continued power of progressive ideas and calls for action around issues that really matter, in the form of an alternative summit, performance art demonstrations, and marches.

Prabhat Patnaik mourns the deaths of three of his close friends, all brilliant people: Arup Mullick, Basudev Chatterji, and Nirupam Sen, whose outstanding character and intellectual genius will be greatly missed.