PRAGOTI

The agenda of disinvestment is again in the policy horizon with the coming back of the UPA to power without the support of the Left. This agenda is however a completely discredited agenda as has been argued here.

In a very well written article published in The Hindu, the well known economist R Nagaraj attacks the policy of disinvestment from a different perspective. The article can be found here.

Subhanil Chowdhury of Pragoti Editorial Team writes about the lacunas in The Mid Year review of the Indian economy which was placed in Parliament on 23 December 2008.

True, the daily miseries encountered by millions and millions of the poor in the country are indescribably grim. And yet, how does one ignore the reality currently unfolding in the stockyard of our stock markets, with scores of families getting ruined, persons engaged in stock-broking firms all of a sudden losing their jobs, a few desperate ones, who have seen their assets disappear in the course of a week’s hurricane, choosing to commit suicide? A sullen anger, mixed with a sense of fright on account of not knowing what is in store tomorrow, hangs in the air. In a large number of cases, those rendered paupers by the share-market devastation were more sinned against than sinning: they were led up the garden path and soon lost their bearing, prudence got juxtaposed with temptation; once they crossed the threshold, they did not know what had hit them. Writes Ashok Mitra in The Telegraph

The world appears to be turning upside down. Otherwise, how could one expect such a screaming headline on manpower retrenchment? The pink slips received by 800 employees of the Jet Airways and 1,100 more on the chopping block did hog the headlines of the mainstream media. Nilotpal Basu discusses.