Education

Despite substantial socio-economic disparities in health, education, and nutrition outcomes, the government is pitching human development expenditure against capital expenditure. In a welfare state, social sector should be the centre of policy prescriptions. Instead of an imperfect assumption of trickle-down, the the government needs to realise that growth and development must go hand in hand.

The National Education Policy 2020 provides a framework for reorganising and revamping higher education in India. Among several of its recommendations, the decision to discontinue the MPhil programme is a signifi cant one. The article makes an attempt to understand the perspective behind the move to discontinue the MPhil programme. The MPhil programme is discontinued for the more research-oriented undergraduate and master’s degrees. In a way, the discontinuation of MPhil is the collateral damage caused by the new structure of degrees that the NEP has proposed.

This article seeks to analyse how Bihar’s prohibition policy is oscillating between hypocrisy and moralism and how the act of ban is turning out to be a big failure, legally and socially, because of illicit liquor selling and rising consumption. Farces in the name of prohibition are choking the legal structure and jail system because of a huge number of cases related to violations of liquor laws.

The comparative role of determinants of household-level consumption expenditure inequalities (henceforth, inequalities) in rural India between two sub-periods, 1994–2005 and 2005–12 are examined, using three rounds of the National Sample Survey Consumer Expenditure Survey. The changes in the components of consumption expenditure and population characteristics are explored that explain inequalities during the two sub-periods, which represent distinct policy environments. We use both a priori and regression-based decomposition methods for the analysis. We find that there is a complete reversal of the role of education in explaining inequalities. It shifted from being an inequality-increasing factor during 1994–2005 to an inequality-equalising factor during 2005–12. This reversal is induced by decreasing consumption returns to education due to the depressed job market. The role of locational factors has increased in explaining the increase in inequalities over time. The non-food components induce an increase in the overall inequalities via an increased expenditure on durables. The within-group component contributes the most to the level of and change in inequalities.