Category Center for Work and Welfare

West Bengal Panchayat Elections: No Free Lunches From Now On

Freebies are valorised as development instruments by ruling parties in India. However, the story is different in real life. While their marginal impact on the lives of the poor is undeniable, their purpose is to mould the electorates’ behaviour in favour of the ruling party. This is what rural Bengal has been witnessing ever since the Trinamul Congress came to power. The project has paid political dividends for the ruling party. But the question before the forthcoming panchayat election is this: will this project be successful in influencing the voting behaviour of the poor in rural Bengal?

Video: Prof Aruna Roy & Nikhil Dey | Social Security, Law & Public Policy | Distinguished Lecture | LPPYF Law and Public Policy Youth Fellowship

Video: Prof Aruna Roy & Nikhil Dey | Social Security, Law & Public Policy | Distinguished Lecture | Day 9 LPPYF Law and Public Policy Youth Fellowship LPPYF Law and Public Policy Youth Fellowship | An Online National Summer School Program…

Welfare and Development in a Neo-Liberal World

In this essay, the author looks at the dynamics of development in an ever-changing global context. The global context here is the proliferation of global capital flows, which has led to increased economic integration among nations, indirectly resulting in increased inequality across nations, across social groups, and among individuals. While keeping in mind that correlation does not imply causation, the author recognizes the fact that the free market is not the only factor that has aided inequality. Within this understanding of rising inequality, the author addresses the need for government intervention in correcting market failures, by drawing heavily on existing literature on development and public economics. The author traces existing literature on the relationship between inequality and capital income while showing how an increase in the skill premium is also related to higher levels of inequality. Finally, the article outlines a few niche areas which require active policy interventions to better direct the flow of capital in order to aid long-term and sustained development practices.

Lack of Safety in India’s Fatalism

In the wake of one of the worst train accidents last Friday at Balasore, Odisha, journalists have turned an unsparing spotlight on rail safety. Many unsavoury features of Indian Railways now stand exposed in the glare of public scrutiny, ranging from the systematic underfunding of the rail safety fund and the snail -pace rollout of the rail safety mechanism, Kavach, to the damning CAG report on train derailments, and the sorry state of the Railways' finances.

The Other ‘Fund Crunch’: How India’s Political Funding limits Inc’s Global Opportunities

If Indian companies are to go global, find global partners accountable to their shareholders and laws that call for clean operations that are at least noiseless, if not quite squeaky and receive inexpensive capital from abroad, Indian politics has to clean itself up.

While we are all proud of India's democracy, few of us bother to fund any political party. We are content to let parties fund themselves by mobilising funds as they traditionally have from the time of the freedom struggle when industrialists like G D Birla used to fund the Congress. But most such funding was informal, with no structured, transparent disclosure of who funded which party and to what extent.

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