WHAT exactly constitutes a non-performing asset (NPA) of a bank is not easy to determine. Since banks tend to roll over credit to borrowers, whether the request for such a roll over arises in the normal course of business or owing to a fundamental inability to pay back the loan, is difficult to decide. The tendency of late therefore has been to see NPAs as an extreme case of a wider category called “stressed assets” which are defined according to certain criteria.The problem of NPAs has arisen in a serious form in recent times because of the change in the nature of banking in the country.

IT is exactly a year ago that Narendra Modi had announced the decision to demonetise, at four hours’ notice, as much as 86 per cent of the total currency of the country. After one year it is clear that none of the objectives that demonetisation was supposed to achieve has been achieved. This should not come as a surprise; indeed so obviously inapposite the measure had been for achieving its stated objectives that most economists, cutting across the ideological spectrum, had predicted its futility.

THE Global Hunger Index brought out annually by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) has just been published for 2017. The fact that India occupies the 100th rank among the 119 nations specifically studied by IFPRI (for whom hunger is a problem), with only two other Asian countries, Pakistan and Afghanistan, below India in the rankings, has attracted some attention in the media.

THE discussion on the Goods and Services Tax (GST) until now has focussed almost exclusively on the distribution of its burden across commodities, on the difficulties of meeting its stringent bureaucratic demands, and on the delays in obtaining claims for refunds. Even the view that it is pushing the economy into a recession has attributed this looming recession merely to its stringent procedural demands which supposedly have tied most sellers in knots.

THE BJP government, like a bull in a China shop, is wrecking the economy. A neoliberal regime, even at the best of times, i.e., even when the economy is booming, brings misery to the vast mass of the working people by imposing upon the petty production sector a process of primitive accumulation of capital, through a withdrawal of State support from it and through leaving it to the mercy of the “spontaneous” working of untrammelled capitalism.