THE governor of the Reserve bank of India, Dr Raghuram Rajan, while inaugurating the annual conference of the Indian Economic Association at Udaipur on December 27, questioned the wisdom of the debt-waiver scheme for agriculturists, which the UPA government had announced in order to halt peasant suicides. He suggested that it had actually affected adversely the flow of credit to the agricultural sector.                Dr Rajan is not the first to question the wisdom of the debt-waiver scheme for agriculturists; many others, especially neo-liberal economists, have done so in the past.

NARENDRA Modi is “marketed” these days as the “development” man. The BJP’s electoral successes, such as they are, are attributed to the fact that everyone wants “development”, which the other political formations, caught up in appeasing this or that “sectional group”, are alleged to have been ignoring until now. And taking a leaf out of Modi’s book, others too have started talking about prioritising “development”.

THE NDA government is reportedly planning drastic cuts in social sector spending in 2014-15 to reduce the fiscal deficit. According to a report in The Hindu of November 27, the cuts relative to the budgetary provisions for this year could be as large as 25 percent in many sectors. While the government has not confirmed these reports, the coyness of its protestations, together with the pervasiveness of such reports, and the clear evidence at least with regard to one area where cuts are being effected, viz.

THE world capitalist economy has been mired in stagnation and high unemployment ever since the 2008 financial crisis. Many were predicting that a turnaround was about to occur, partly because of the fact that the US economy last month showed larger job creation than of late, and also because it had grown at 3.5 percent last quarter which is higher than for some time now.

India shows a substantial rise in per head food production in recent years but it is merely  adding to exports and to  stocks – food consumption by the people shows no rise FOR a quarter century from the early 1980s, production of grain per head of population at the global level kept on declining. Developing countries were urged under neo-liberal free trade policies promoted by advanced countries and global institutions, to export more and more agricultural products, and their pliant governments did exactly that.