Prime Minister Narendra Modi claimed full credit for bringing financial inclusion to the people India in his 25 May 2015 speech in Mathura. https://twitter.com/narendramodi_in/status/602801492513333248 That's not, how should I put it, consistent with the facts. Take a look a the chart below that shows how many "Basic Savings Bank Deposit Accounts" (BSBDA) were opened over …
Continue reading Modi’s claims about Jan Dhan Yojana are, shall we say, exaggerated
With the Modi government having completed a year in office, its economic record is the debate du jour. Turns out that the United Progressive Alliance's (UPA) corruption and policy paralysis are now history and all would be well if only the economy would notice and jump to it (will happen by 2016... okay, by 2017 …
Continue reading Arun Jaitley, Pranab Mukherjee: Spot the difference
The Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi seems to have very specific views about Indians who wish to to eat beef. https://twitter.com/redditindia/status/601633825303764992 His boss, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, famously criticised the United Progressive Alliance government for facilitating beef exports (which he termed a "pink revolution"), and repeatedly visited this theme during his …
Of all the topics covered in this blog, India's highway construction programme attracts the most yawns from friends and family (and the least interest in social media). But apart from its intrinsic importance and the resonance that highway construction programmes have long had in discourses of modernity -- think the New Deal and Hitler's autobahns -- it …
Continue reading What are you smoking Mr Gadkari (and can I have some)?
What proportion of industrial projects are being held up by land acquisition challenges? A somewhat abstruse debate entered the mainstream after Rahul Gandhi cited Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) data (provided by the Finance Ministry) in a 12 May Lok Sabha speech: https://twitter.com/OfficeOfRG/status/598070175515021312 Although I have argued elsewhere that the 8% figure may be an …
Thanks to a Right to Information request to the Ministry of Finance by Venkatesh Nayak of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, we have more detail regarding how many industrial projects are being held up by land acquisition difficulties. The data were collected by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) and analysed in Chapter 4 (PDF) …
Continue reading Modi’s land amendment would do very little for stalled projects
