THE first advance estimates released by the NSO on January 6, estimates the nominal GDP of India for the current financial year 2022-23 to be Rs 273 lakh crores and in this backdrop the budget proposed by the finance minister projects a 10.5 per cent nominal growth leading to a nominal GDP of 301 lakh crores for the financial year 2023-24. The Economic Survey 2022-23 estimates a real growth rate for the year 2023-24 to be 6.5 per cent as the baseline figure which indicates an implicit inflation to the tune of 4 per cent for the financial year 2023-24.

CUTTING down expenditures that impact upon the poor while bailing out the corporates has been the hallmark of neoliberal policies. Profit making by any means and favouring the rich by way of offering subsidies from state exchequer to the big corporates is being legitimised as pro-market and development enhancing strategies. Hardly any issues are being raised by the mainstream media on these sops while subsidies to farmers or to the middle class in terms of provisioning of electricity, water, education or health services has been termed as ‘freebies’ granted from tax payers money.

THE quarterly estimates released for the second quarter (July-September) by the National Accounts Division estimate a GDP growth of 6.3 per cent which was pegged at 13.5 per cent in the first quarter of 2022-23. It is understandable that the previous figure was relatively high because of the low base effect and growth rates show moderate trends as situations normalise. On the sectoral growth trends what seems positive is the recovery of growth in contact-intensive services particularly the hospitality industry which suffered a huge contraction during the pandemic.

MARX’S unique concept of ‘mode of production’ implies production not in the narrow technological sense but a comprehensive unity of concrete relations between humans and nature captured by means of production and that between human beings themselves who consciously participate in the social processes of production defining production relations.Mode of production as a conceptual category helps us analyse the empirical regularities of history.

IT has been almost an untold convention held by the pink papers and mainstream media that an expenditure from government exchequer that flows to the poor directly or indirectly are to be termed as ‘populist’ in political discourse and recently as ‘freebies’ in the context of ‘economic prudence’. A mirror image, in the lens of class, is the huge applaud the same media shower on policies that propose tax cuts or subsidies to capitalists.