Mainstream Weekly

Democracy Zindabad! : The Message of 2019 Congress Manifesto and its Holistic Logic

Kamal Nayan Kabra — 2019-04-23T19:44:27Z

Just as elections come and elections go, so do manifestos. They have rarely received wide-spread attention, much less succeed to evoke fierce and widely participated popular debates. However, they too invite their normal comple-ments of bouquets or brickbats. Their influence on vote-garnering remains unsubstantiated but cannot be written-off. For example, the better-off sections who rejoice at even a trivial cut in tax imposts tend to be dismissive, even sarcastic, about any positive offer (…)

- 2019

Some Thoughts on GST : A Victory of the Powerful Crony Lobbies

Kamal Nayan Kabra — 2016-07-09T09:07:29Z

Even without a detailed study of the nitty-gritty and minutiae of the proposed legislation on the goods and services tax (GST), prima facie it can be maintained that there is a lot in its design and implications to endear it to the neo-liberal enthusiasts. Hence little wonder they go on to parade it as a major tax ‘reform' in India, a tax reform which covers practically all the goods and services in every nook and corner of the country. It seems once this tax is legislated at the Union level (…)

- 2016

The Fiscal Game 2014 - 15

Kamal Nayan Kabra — 2014-07-20T13:53:44Z

Do the slew of Budget proposals tell a coherent story with its main characters and their roles defining their relativities vis-à-vis each other and in the process unravel the overall plot and the moral of the story? With an over-advertised play, the compulsion to satisfy everyone in the audience is surely pressing but the Drama Company, the actors, the story-writers, the financiers and so on, that is, each constituency, may tend to lend their hand in the actual performance. So the remaining (…)

- 2014

Union Budget 2014-15: A Quick Overview and Some Questions

Kamal Nayan Kabra — 2014-07-14T17:28:43Z

The Government in India seems to be on the cusp of a watershed in many different dimensions. This seems to be so not simply on account of a new government assuming office but on account of the attempts, fairly loud ones at that, to project a big change and a good degree of shared assumption of something different from what we have become used to in the course of many changes of government we have witnessed so far. Whether the same holds good for the process of governance in its many aspects, (…)

- 2014

Moneyfestos of the Plutocracy

Kamal Nayan Kabra — 2014-04-20T17:27:24Z

Any attempt to make sense of the content and role of the manifestos issued by the various political parties would surely acquire a context for appraisal by means of at least a quick overview of the nature of the economic and political processes and forces which are the principal players shaping the main contentious issues placed before the electorate. It is a huge task but what we attempt here is to preface our main exercise by a quick overview of what appears to us to be the nature of (…)

- 2014

Gujarat : A Model of ‘Development'?

Kamal Nayan Kabra — 2014-04-12T17:27:13Z

A notable feature of the 2014 elections seems to be, at least on the surface, that development, particularly the inter-State differences in levels of development (and the associated role of governance of the leadership), variously understood and projected with no sharp and clear articulation (about its socio-economic content and sustainability), has been brought centre-stage. Clearly the intention seems to have been to make development the talk of the town (and, of course, villages and tea (…)

- 2014

Contemporaneity of the 1930s: Some Aspects of the Lives of Low-Caste Farm Labour in India

Kamal Nayan Kabra — 2014-03-03T16:33:34Z

REVIEW ARTICLE
The Social and Economic Conditions of the Lower Agricultural Castes in the Early 20th Century (A Survey of the Kotch State, Rajputana) by Ram Pratap Gondel; New India Publications, New Delhi; August 2010; pages 176; Rs 380.
The book that we intend to discuss is a dissertation written for the Master's degree of the Lucknow University in Sociology and Economics in the early 1930s by Shri Ram Pratap Gondal—who is a centenarian. The task undertaken was to examine the (…)

- 2014

FDI in Retail: A Low-down on the Falsehood over an Exclusionary Policy

Kamal Nayan Kabra — 2012-10-02T19:34:33Z

Intense and motivated propaganda, powerful national and international diplomatic pressure, verging on pure and simple arms-twisting of the kind the Third World has been facing for decades by means of the active role of the econo-mic hit-men in the policy establishments, huge cash-back lobbying, both in India and abroad, blunt attempts to bamboozle the persons holding key positions in India's policy establishment through a combination of hissing and kissing have been deployed to make India (…)

- 2012

Some Aspects of the Black Economy: Inputs for Policy Debates

Kamal Nayan Kabra — 2012-06-08T15:37:32Z

It is paradoxical that despite so much ferment on the question of black economy, cronyism and corruption, some critical considerations which must be taken into account in the debates over the policy alternatives for curbing the black economy rarely receive the attention they deserve, in any case without the discourse itself getting infected by the virus of the black economy. This is so especially from the point of view of the need to articulate the policies which are much more than mere (…)

- 2012

FDI in Retail Trade — A Decision Most Foul and a Case of Self-goal

Kamal Nayan Kabra — 2011-12-12T18:06:30Z

At long last the cat is out of the bag. By moving heaven and earth over a period of nearly four years and camouflaging the decision by various conditions, more cosmetic than real, to mollify the expected and legitimate opposition to it, the Union Government has decided to welcome 51 per cent foreign direct investment (FDI) in over fifty million plus cities (provided the State governments agree).
It has been also decided that for anyone to set up shops in India, a minimum investment of $ (…)

- 2011