Commentary

The Draft National Education Policy, 2019 strives to provide a vision, albeit not presenting any statistical basis or taking into account the sociopolitical and historical contexts, the regional or statewise variations and disparities, financial responsibilities, and the gains made by the earlier initiatives.

The contemporary Dalit movement in Maharashtra is marked by five distinct trends, that is, increased militancy, sub-caste assertion, middle-class activism, public symbolism, and a rightward shift. These are not manifested through political mobilisation but predominantly in sociocultural spheres. The congruence and divergence of these from B R Ambedkar’s normative political project need to be explored.

Recently, regulators as well as market participants have raised serious concerns about the validity of external credit ratings in predicting the true status of corporate default risk in India. A comparison is made of the historical rating trends in India along with the global benchmarks. The credit rating agencies need to provide more insights about corporate rating movements to enable banks to derive early warning signals about inherent credit risk. The kind of risk indicators that need to be disclosed has been highlighted.

The Bharatiya Janata Party, which was decimated by the Congress in the assembly polls held in November 2018, bounced back in Chhattisgarh by recording an impressive victory in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. While a strong anti-incumbency sentiment worked against the BJP in the assembly elections, Narendra Modi’s image-building exercise helped the party’s candidates win in the Lok Sabha polls.

The contributions of Paul Romer and William Nordhaus to both economic theory and policy are critically assessed here. By undertaking a brief history of economic thinking prior to their pioneering work, it validates the Nobel award. However, it is argued that the Nobel Prize has mostly been awarded to work that employs neoclassical, or more accurately, marginalist assumptions. On the policy front, it is suggested that India should formulate its economic policies by drawing inspiration from some of the work by Samuel Bowles and Mariana Mazzucato alongside that of Romer and Nordhaus.