‘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.

Global Employment Trends During Tariff Wars and Technological Change

EMPLOYMENT across the world is undergoing changes. The changes are multi-dimensional, driven by shifting nature of labour contract by skill grades, impacted by uncertainty and shocks in supply chains. However, the tendencies are neither uniform across countries nor do they show uniformity in direction of change. In some advanced countries, as reported by the ILO in a recent report, unemployment rate has fallen although market sentiments are sluggish.

Socialism and Marx’s ‘Universal Sun’ of Freedom for All

CAPITALISM seems to be approaching its metabolic limits. Global capitalism is facing stagnation in growth with rising inequality together with a planetary crisis related to climate change. Also, there is growing tension between use of new technology and the distribution of gains.

GST Rate Cut: Exuberance and Reality

THE recent rationalisation of GST rates seems to be a sigh of relief to consumers as well as to producers after facing a tyranny of cumbersome tax regime for eight long years since the introduction of GST in 2017.

Growth Estimates with Incongruent Trends

THE first quarter year-on-year estimates of GDP for the current FY 2025-26 turns out to be higher than the last year’s quarter one figures. But these are estimates and hence need to be dissected and seen in relation to other official estimates provided by the government. At the outset a 7.8 per cent growth rate in the first quarter of 2025-26 is higher than all the four quarterly year-on-year growth estimates of the previous year. This is important particularly when lot of uncertainty emerges in the global trade relations.

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Peoples Democracy

economic policy & Labour