Articles by Prabhat Patnaik

The transition from the Planning Commission to the Niti Aayog reflects the completion of the transition from a state professing anti-imperialism to a neo-liberal state.Niti Aayog will oversee a greater centralisation of powers in the central government, and with the abolition of the National Development Council and its replacement by regional councils, the limited say the states had on policies and the flow of funds stands further eroded. In short, the constraints on state governments will be tightened rather than loosened in theNiti Aayog era.

The nature of contemporary political economy in third world countries like India precludes not just socialist planning, but even Nehruvian planning, social democratic planning, fascist planning, or even planning in the sense of the nation state managing or negotiating its relations with globalised capital. It precludes any role for a "Planning Commission".

We, concerned citizens and organisations from different walks of life and with different world views, are united in opposing the death penalty and ­demanding its repeal in India.

Once we abandon the false theoretical premise of welfare economics that past period's goods and services are available in the current period as well, a number of seemingly contradictory bits of evidence on the measurement and level of poverty in India fall into place and gel into a coherent story. When poverty is defined in terms of access to a bundle of goods and services, which includes a minimum number of calories, there can be little doubt that poverty has been increasing in neo-liberal India.

The macroeconomics underlying the Twelfth Plan is flawed because the picture that the Planning Commission paints of a higher savings ratio being associated with a reduced current deficit ratio will hold only through a reduction in income. If exports are going to be restricted by world demand conditions, then the way to increase output is by lowering the import propensity, not by raising the saving propensity, as advocated in the Twelfth Plan.