n December 2022, the World Bank revised upwards its GDP growth forecast for India to 6.9 percent for 2022-23, underlining the fact that the Indian economy was showing higher resilience to global shocks. This economic trajectory of India also gives India a distinct place in global politics today. There is a reason why the West, despite its differences with India over Ukraine, has continued to substantively engage with New Delhi.
Whichever way one looks at it, the promise by select state governments and political parties to return to the Old Pension System for Government employees is a freebie of the kind that Prime Minister Narendra Modi referred to as Revadi. It is not affordable. It is not targeted at the deserving. It is not productive. It creates a terrible precedent. It ought to carry the following “health” warnings: disastrous for state finances, additional liabilities for future taxpayers and detrimental to the economic well-being of the majority.
It is crucial to critique the Economically Weaker Section (EWS) reservation scheme for what it intends to do—push out caste-based reservations and replace them with economic criteria. But one should approach this not the way BJP expects one to do it. There has been much-needed critique and large-scale reaction to how EWS questions settled Constitutional provisions for Social Justice, but there are other essential issues one needs to raise about the EWS that have gone missing.
India’s decision to focus on balanced economic agreements, which include a wide set of areas and not just merchandise trade, with key economic and strategic partners reflects India’s much stronger geoeconomic and geostrategic position and confidence in its ability to pursue India’s national interests. India is carefully choosing its partners for economic agreements (the media description of them as free trade agreements is misleading and inaccurate and reflects old thinking).
Under the series, The State of the Economy – #EconDialogue, Center for the Study of Finance and Economics (CSFE), IMPRI Impact and Policy Research Institute, New Delhi organized #WebPolicyTalk, a distinguished lecture on the topic India’s Macroeconomic Resilience amidst Global Fragility: Facts, Factors and Forecasts, by Dr Deepak Mishra on August 24, 2022. Dr Deepak Mishra is the Director and Chief Executive of the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER), New Delhi. The session was chaired by Dr Rafiq Dossani, Director, RAND Center for Asia Pacific Policy, a Senior Economist and the Professor of Policy Analysis, Pardee RAND Graduate School.
Harsh V. Pant & Shashank Mattoo More than 16 months after taking office, President Joe Biden stepped off Air…