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While the impact of groundwater irrigation on the productivity of crops and other parameters has been well-documented in India, not many studies are available highlighting its role in the value of agricultural output using district-level data. This paper attempts to find out the impact of groundwater irrigation on VAO using cross-sectional data for 189 Indian districts covering three time points: 1990–93, 2003–06, and 2017–20. Both descriptive and regression analyses have been used in this paper. The descriptive analysis shows that VAO per hectare is significantly higher for those districts having a high level of groundwater coverage (>50%) than the districts having less (<30%) groundwater irrigation. The multivariate regression analysis carried out by using yield augmenting and infrastructure variables shows that the role of groundwater irrigation in impacting VAO has significantly and consistently increased over time.

An exploration of the information content within money confirms that despite the theoretical inconsistence inherent within a simple sum monetary aggregate, money supply (M3) has been a consistent leading indicator of the general slowdown in economic activities in India since March 2010. The paper also establishes an exogenous influence of the central bank balance sheet over M3 through a statistically stable money multiplier, a long-term stable relationship, and bidirectional Granger causality between M3 and reserve money. However, the monetary policy measures of the central bank that determine reserve money themselves take a cue from economy-wide factors, as presented in a multivariate forecast model for reserve money.

The works of three non-Brahmin educated women from 19th-century western India are read against dominant historiographies of womanhood. It is argued that these women resist being interpreted as evidence of liberal enlightenment thinking in anti-caste social reform, or as regional dissenting voices to incipient nationalist developments that place the spiritual–material binary at the centre of the women’s question. Rather, their works are read as intellectual resources that imagined a new ethic of sociality, using an embodied reason to alter the imagination of the “inner spiritual” by first destabilising it and then reimagining it. The paper locates the invention of the spiritual–material binary outside of anti-colonial motives via these women, making the articulation of a separation between the spiritual and the material untenable.

Union Budget 2023–24 reaffi rms India’s commitment to promote fi nancial inclusion measures and invest in digital infrastructure to support and achieve a fi nancially inclusive economy. This article provides a comprehensive overview of fi nancial inclusion initiatives since 2005–06 and a way forward from the current budget.

The issue of apology that surrounds one particular historical figure arguably pitches every gamut of politics around the said solitary figure.

Only a substantial step-up in savings and investments can ensure sustained growth.

How was Union Budget 2023–24 able to simultaneously consolidate the defi cit and increase capital expenditure? Where did the fi scal space come from? And where is the capex going? Stepping back, how are broader public sector dynamics evolving—both borrowing and capex? As debt has surged post pandemic, focus will turn to medium-term fi scal imperatives. What is India’s debt-stabilising nominal GDP growth? And if defi cits must be reduced in the coming years but health, education and infrastructure spending must simultaneously go up, where can the fi scal space come from? And why is it important to focus on direct taxes—instead of indirect taxes—on the revenue side, while increasing absorptive capacity to spend on the expenditure side? This essay seeks to answer these questions.