https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/the-modi-fication-of-india-is-still-thrilling-markets-2993868  

The ‘Modi-fication’ of India is still thrilling markets The Indian prime minister is so successful at polarizing the majority Hindu vote by playing on its fears, he doesn’t have to pursue profligate — or even populist — fiscal policies

the appetite for a third term for the Indian leader is very high in the global financial industry. “Modi has done an unbelievable job in India,” JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon said Tuesday at the Economic Club of New York. Both Goldman and JPMorgan are predicting a deluge of overseas capital after general elections are over on June 4. (The BJP is favorite to win the contest.)

Still, this is the start of a new compact between markets and Modi, one in which investors are betting on what he won’t do, rather than what he will.

The first belief is that while Modi 3.0 may take a more authoritarian turn, the Indian leader won’t follow the lead of China’s President Xi Jinping. The stock market will still have to read the tea leaves to figure out which business group is likely to be blessed with juicy contracts and favorable policy, but there is little risk of New Delhi turning the screws on the private sector. In other words, no nasty surprises like Beijing’s crackdown on its technology industry.

https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/mumbai/no-activities-involving-guest-speaker-tiss-students-call-it-infringement-of-rights-9214609/  dipti Singh 

Apart from calling the restrictions to be arbitrary, the SU in its official statement issued on Wednesday claimed, “The current environment in TISS is a complete violation of the student entitlement suggested by the University Grants Commission (UGC), which states that as democratic citizens, the students are entitled to freedom of thought and expression within and outside their institution.”

Demanding that the new guidelines should be prepared on priority, the statement also urges the administration to include student representatives in reframing them to make them student-centric.

https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/can-green-credits-benefit-indias-forests/article68106159.ece   April 26, 2024 02:24 am Jacob Koshy

https://thewire.in/labour/for-desperate-jobless-indian-youth-war-conflict-zones-abroad-are-no-deterrents 

Unemployment at home pushes thousands of Indians to look overseas for work – even war zones. What’s missing is a coherent policy to protect them.

While illegal outmigration from India is nothing new – one study found that about 725,000 Indians now live illegally in the US – the movement of people to conflict zones reflects potential migrants’ desire to escape desperate conditions at home for a relatively better life elsewhere, even when confronted with human emergencies caused by war.

Indians migrating to Russia and then finding themselves thrown into the conflict as combatants, and hundreds of people in Uttar Pradesh and Haryana states signing up for jobs in Israel, underscore an important point: migrating to conflict zones is considered a better choice to the uncertainties caused by lack of employment at home.

A recent report made two startling claims: one, about 83% of India’s youth grapple with “soaring unemployment”. Second, the proportion of educated youth (15 to 29 years old), with at least secondary level education, among the country’s total unemployed youth jumped from 35.2% in 2002 to 65.7% in 2022.

by Chandan Nandy

26/04/2024

Status of Indian job market: Fact versus fiction  https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/status-of-indian-job-market-fact-versus-fiction-13759450.html  Bibek Debroy There may be concerns about employment, but it is not as disastrous as is often made out to be.. In an informal economy like India, where there are usually no clear employer-employee relationships, unlike in more advanced countries.... At present, both the Annual Survey of Industries (ASI) and the Quarterly Employment Survey (QES) have biases. Agriculture is a different proposition. But even outside of agriculture, neither is comprehensive in coverage. Both can be streamlined and improved, and time lags can be reduced. ..

the RBI’s report based on KLEMS dated October 2022...  “Employment, as measured by workforce participation rates, has been declining in India, especially among rural females.... between 2011 and 2017.” There has been no report after that. But, since 2017–18, there seems to have been a pickup in employment. For manufacturing and services (construction, trade), it is quite visible after 2020–21.

 Prashant Bhishan  talks about the issue of the figures .. https://youtu.be/t4ymo3DdgTk?t=21 

The Truth about Artificial Intelligence and ChatGPT | Dhruv Rathee  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJefOB8kec8  Jul 16, 2023  Over the past year, artificial intelligence has emerged as a prominent and widely discussed subject. It is no longer merely a buzzword, but rather a practical tool that we can actively employ. Revolutionary platforms such as ChatGPT and Midjourney are transforming the functioning of our world. However, the advancement of AI also raises significant and profound inquiries. Will AI supersede human capabilities? Does it pose a threat to humanity's existence? What about the potential job displacement caused by AI? If you share these concerns, watch this video by Dhruv Rathee, where he delves into the realities of artificial intelligence, offering insights and answers to these pressing questions.

The Future of Jobs 2020 report WEF:  Recession and Automation Changes Our Future of Work, But There are Jobs Coming, Report Says 20 Oct 2020

The workforce is automating faster than expected, displacing 85 million jobs in next five years
The robot revolution will create 97 million new jobs, but communities most at risk from disruption will need support from businesses and governments
In 2025, analytical thinking, creativity and flexibility are among the top skills needed; with data and artificial intelligence, content creation and cloud computing the top emerging professions
The most competitive businesses will be those that choose to reskill and upskill current employees

The public sector will need a three-tiered approach to help workers. This includes providing stronger safety nets for displaced workers, improving the education and training systems and creating incentives for investments in markets and the jobs of tomorrow.

Companies can measure and disclose their treatment of employees by adopting environmental, social and governance (ESG) metrics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH1fFdjzJAw What will the future of jobs be like?

Antimarket: Capitalism Decarbonised https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n07/william-davies/antimarket review of  Review and discussion of: The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet , by Brett Christophers

Liberal ideology  imagine that ‘economic life’ (i.e. competitive egalitarian markets) still rules the roost. This myopia is manifest in the economics curricula of major universities, which have continued to exclude theories which emphasise power, uncertainty, monopoly and instability, and clung to an orthodoxy in which economic activity is chiefly determined by prices and incentives.

Politicians, meanwhile, cleave to liberal fairy tales about making work pay, social mobility, and ownership for all—which are increasingly divorced from a reality of in-work poverty, unearned wealth, and spiralling rents. And financial services masquerade as just another ‘sector’ among many, selling their wares in a marketplace like humble shopkeepers.

Brett Christophers, in The Price Is Wrong, adds to this list a potentially more drastic symptom: a failure on the part of policymakers to understand the energy transition on which the future of the planet hinges. The operating assumption of energy economists over the years has been that the key obstacle to the growth of renewable energy is its higher cost, which renders it unable to compete against fossil fuels in the energy market, and hence reliant on government subsidy. It was a moment of great excitement, therefore, when in 2015 the International Energy Agency reported that, finally, renewable technologies (primarily solar and wind farms) were ‘no longer cost outliers’ relative to gas, coal, oil and nuclear power generation.

the goods on which society depends have been privatised in the name of encouraging market competition, but with results that look nothing at all like a ‘free’ market, and with predictable beneficiaries. These goods haven’t just been privatised, but ‘assetised’, in the sense that they have been packaged up, quantified and managed in ways that suit the calculations and interests of financiers. (The difference in the case of renewable energy is how unusually treacherous the assetisation project has been, to the point where it has often proved impossible to get the necessary turbines and solar panels built in the first place.) The financial sector deals in the language of risk, but it seeks out situations in which profitability is effectively guaranteed, a certain level of return baked in. 

the central fact of the climate crisis is that there is very little time, and the scale of the political challenge increases with each passing day. The importance of acting as swiftly as possible scrambles our usual political and moral coordinates, forcing us to look beyond the political and economic solutions we might usually hope for, and more favourably on those which are considered ‘realistic’.

Waiting for solutions to emerge in a bottom-up fashion, whether from activists or from markets, is not sufficient. Only the state has the power, the money and the coordinating capacity to direct capital investment at sufficient scale and speed towards the renewables sector. In practice, the distinction between a ‘de-risking’ state (which tops up private sector profits) and a Green New Deal (which builds new public infrastructure) may be less clear-cut than it appears on paper. The priority, as it has been now for decades, is to go as big and as soon as possible

by AMOGH ROHMETRA

23/04/2024

For the underpaid, underrepresented Adivasi workers of Alipurduar and Jalpaiguri, elections are often a time to express their discontent. by Nolina Minj

https://scroll.in/article/1066783/view-from-the-margins-in-the-tea-gardens-of-bengal-neither-ram-mandir-nor-kashmir-is-a-poll-issue 

Voting is often the only chance that many of India's marginalised groups get to express themselves. As national elections approach, Scroll's reporters fanned out across the country to talk to groups with little socio-political power as part of a series called the View from the Margins. The aim: try to understand how the powerless and the voiceless have fared under a decade of the Modi government.

View from the Margins: For Adivasis of Kerala, the state is not always a shining example of equality by Johanna Deeksha

https://scroll.in/article/1066510/view-from-the-margins-for-adivasis-of-kerala-the-state-is-not-always-a-shining-example-of-equality 

Leela Santhosh, an Adivasi filmmaker, says her community suffers from prejudice and neglect, no matter which party rules at the Centre.

View from the Margins: A Dalit Christian explains why he will be voting for change by Johanna Deeksha

https://scroll.in/article/1066635/view-from-the-margins-a-dalit-christian-explains-why-he-wants-the-bjp-to-lose 

The increasing attacks on minorities during Narendra Modi’s tenure have convinced Christuraj S that it is time for power to switch hands.

View from the Margins: Uttarakhand’s ghost villages embody the state’s economic challenges by Vineet Bhalla

https://scroll.in/article/1066545/view-from-the-margins-uttarakhands-ghost-villages-embody-the-states-economic-challenges 

Limited economic prospects, poor infrastructure and natural calamities driven by climate change have sparked large-scale migration.

View from the Margins: A Lepcha activist describes the destructive development in Sikkim by Vaishnavi Rathore

https://scroll.in/article/1066047/view-from-the-margins-a-lepcha-activist-describes-the-destructive-development-in-sikkim 

Mayalmit Lepcha has watched with dread as successive governments have sanctioned dams in the state despite its fragile geography.

View from the margins: How a Mumbai realtor is helping NRC-scared Muslims rectify their documents by Neerad Pandharipande

https://scroll.in/article/1065942/view-from-the-margins-after-caa-enforcement-muslims-rush-to-get-their-identity-documents-in-order 

With the Citizenship Amendment Act implemented, will the National Register of Citizens be next? The question is tormenting many in Mumbai. 

by Nolina Minj

22/04/2024