COVID-19 pandemic is probably India’s greatest challenge since independence, former RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan said on Saturday and added that in many places the government was not present to help the people for various reasons. Addressing a virtual event organised by University of Chicago Center in Delhi, Rajan said India needs a quick bankruptcy process … Read more
It is for policymakers to decide whether a ‘fair’ guaranteed income to the top 200,000 farmers of Punjab Haryana — remember, MSP is not subject to market forces and is like a price set by a monopolist — is to place them among the richest earners in India. Synopsis The Punjab farmer has the lowest … Read more
Economists like Raghuram Rajan, Abhijit V Banerjee and Manmohan Singh, as well as politicians like P Chidambaram and Yogendra Yadav, have been advocating more cash be put in the hands of people. But they haven’t answered ‘How?’, ‘How much?’, and ‘At what cost?’ Synopsis Economists like Raghuram Rajan, Abhijit V Banerjee and Manmohan Singh, as … Read more
By Raghuram Rajan The recently released quarterly GDP growth numbers for the first quarter of FY2020-21 should alarm us all. The 23.9% contraction in India (and the numbers will probably be worse when we get estimates of the damage in the informal sector) compares with a drop of 12.4% in Italy and 9.5% in the … Read more
A pedestrian walks past the RBI building in Mumbai. Some of Acharya’s hard-hitting speeches provide a glimpse of the wide chasm between Mint Street and Delhi during his stint as deputy governor of RBI between January 2017 and July 2019 (Bloomberg image) By Ananth Narayan Quest for Restoring Financial Stability in India is a collection … Read more
By Raghuram RajanThe Covid-19 pandemic will create, perhaps, the most significant economic challenge for India in my memory. It does not help that GoI has allowed legacy problems to fester, leaving us ill-prepared to face the pandemic. One such problem is bad bank loans, euphemistically called ‘non-performing assets’ (NPAs).In his insightful new book, The Quest … Read more
NEW DELHI: Former Reserve Bank governor Raghuram Rajan has said the countries that tried to fight coronavirus pandemic in a decentralised manner have done reasonably well as compared to others. Citing the example of Germany and South Korea, Rajan said that these countries have allocated resources at the centre but left the details to provinces. … Read more