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.
Now, concessional grain being given would no longer be available and the poor will be forced to buy 64% of their foodgrain requirement from the market at a high price. The government has announced free foodgrains to 81 crore poor in the country for one year.
The Ukraine war will shape global politics for years to come. When the year began, the debate on Ukraine had already started. Vladimir Putin was amassing his troops around Ukraine.
There has been a global call for justice and an end to discrimination and violence against women in the private and public domains of the post-pandemic world by the transnational feminist movements. The traditional wars in two hundred locations on this planet have devastated the lives of civilians. The feminist perspective on peace-making, peace-building and peacekeeping aver that the quest for peace is an eternal pursuit for human fulfilment. Peace or absence of antagonistic, violent, or destabilising conflict is essential for ‘existence’ to become ‘life,’ for ‘survival’ to become ‘human.’
The fiscal deficit created now translates into a higher debt burden that future generations have to service. Is that fair? It is more than fair. In the misty mornings of peak winter, a flock of sharp-beaked, joyless birds takes flight in the capital – Fiscal Deficit Hawks, who swoop down on North Block, where harried finance ministry officials race against time to prepare the Union government’s annual budget, to screech sharp orders to slash the fiscal deficit.
The Chinese approach gels rather well with the Arab World’s ‘Act East Policy’.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a major challenge for China, with unprecedented lockdowns and occasional horror stories of the origins and spread of COVID-19 and how it has been dealt with, leading to nationwide protests which have been partially successful in achieving the winding down of excessive COVID-19 restrictions. President Xi Jinping, emboldened after being crowned the third time by the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CPC), did have the taste of people’s ire and his limitations as the Chinese economy was also being hurt and a downward trend was being noticed.
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. In fact, India's ties with the West have grown significantly amidst all the negative press India has received in the West. Where journalists remain prisoners of their short-term outlooks, policy-makers in the West recognize the real story -- the rise of India as a credible geopolitical and geo-economic player in the 21st century.