High Incidence of Educated Youth Unemployment

Aspirational India with a huge increase in the educated population ironically seems to be adding jobs in agriculture in the recent past! The ‘demographic dividend’ as it is often referred to, with a higher proportion of working age people within the total population, is going to be over by 2030; thereafter the share of the young is likely to decline after reaching its peak. At its peak, the share of the working age population will be more than double the dependent population.

War on Iran and the Declining Empire

This time the display of war in primetime news is not so apparent. Drones and missiles bombarded by the US with utmost precision killing civilians and military as the spectacle of global power is not being televised and celebrated as was the case during the Iraq war. In fact, the war of aggression imposed by the US and plotted by Israel on Iran seems to be evolving as a war of attrition. The US style of aggression in the name of restoring democracy or saving people from Islamic authoritarianism didn’t gain any traction this time.

New Technology: Unpaid and Unused Labour

Technologies are meant to reduce human effort in the production process. Sometimes innovation creates new products which cater to new uses. These uses may not even exist before the product being launched meaning necessity is not always the mother of invention as the saying goes. In fact, the different goods and services people use are not fixed for ever; rather new products and services are added to the consumption basket signifying the progress of civilisation and well-being.

India’s ‘America First’ Trade Deal

The India-US trade negotiations expressed in the joint statement have reached a framework of an interim agreement as an expression of commitment to broader India-US Bilateral Trade Agreements. The US President Trump seems to be committed to reducing trade deficits with countries like China, the EU, Vietnam, Japan, India and Canada pursuing his ‘America First’ policy.

‘Fiscal Prudence’ at the Cost of Common People

THE finance minister Ms Nirmala Sitharaman presents her ninth budget for the financial year 2026-27 with an estimated GDP of the economy pegged at Rs 393 lakh crores, 10 per cent higher than the GDP of Rs 357 lakh crores estimated for the current financial year. Before the budget, the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation released the First Advance Estimate of GDP for the year 2025-26 on January 7, 2026 and the Economic Survey 2025-26 was tabled by the Chief Economic Advisor V Anantha Nageswaran on January 29.

“Modernity” Is Not the Same as Lack of Poverty

A CAPITALIST economy is characterized by continuous process and product innovations, which means that the basket of goods consumed by the people keeps changing over time. New goods are typically introduced by capitalist producers keeping mainly middle class consumers in mind, and once new goods start replacing the old goods, the production capacity in the old-goods-producing sectors declines and the entire population goes over willy-nilly to buying the new goods.

Ugly Face of Imperialism and the New Cold War

The colonial aggression of abducting Nicholas Maduro, the head of a foreign sovereign country is celebrated by the US president as an efficient military operation conducted to restore democracy and freedom in Venezuela. Maduro has to be portrayed as the head of a drug cartel so that US intervention can be justified as a matter of national security although Venezuela has a nominal share in cocaine trade and hardly produces fentanyl.

Why Right-wing Governments are against Right to Work?

The dismantling of the world’s largest demand-based employment guarantee scheme, MNREGA, marks a shift from rights-based welfare programmes that value dignity of labour and responsibility of the state in providing employment to right-wing welfare schemes that invoke arbitrary discrimination and rest on feudal benevolence.

Rising Inequality and Politics of Resistance

Extreme inequality in terms of income, wealth, gender and regions has become the hallmark of neoliberalism. Fewer than 60,000 multi-millionaires who are the top 0.001 per cent wealthiest of the world possess three times the wealth of half of humanity. Their share has grown over the years. The top 10 per cent of the world earn more than what the bottom 90 percent of the population earns and the poorest 50 per cent earns only 10 per cent of global income.

On The Question of ‘Engine of Growth’

Since the past three decades policy makers in India and across the developing world had been grappling with the problem of identifying the appropriate ‘engine of growth’ for future development. A recent report by the NITI Aayog seems to propose a double engine of manufacturing and services. There had been contesting views as to what ought to be the real engine in a country which has a per capita income falling within the low-middle income group although India ranks at the top of this group.

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Peoples Democracy

economic policy & Labour