Best of the Week | Mint's best works from last week
₹26,000 per month v. ₹10,000 in the rest of India) committing suicide? Why does Punjab, India’s most highly irrigated state, continue to be a home for farmer protests? Sayantan Bera, Mint’s resident expert on India’s rural economy, dives into Punjab’s farming communities to explain the crisis unfolding in the land of the five rivers. A groundwater crisis and the persistently broken economics of farming in India make for a distressing picture.
But what can be done about it? Are the demands of protesting farmers reasonable? What makes them so dogged in their pursuit of these demands? Bera tries to find answers to some of these burning questions. Payal Bhattacharya and Pragya Srivastava report on India’s latest gross domestic product (GDP) or economic growth numbers for the December quarter that were released earlier this week. While the GDP growth came in at 8.4%, beating estimates, the details have surprised economists.
A Mint poll by 17 economists had projected GDP growth at 6.6%. While GDP has shown an impressive rise, the sharp slowdown in gross value added (GVA) looks worrisome, they report. GVA growth was just 6.5% in October-December, down from 7.7% the previous quarter.
Gross value added is GDP minus net taxes on products. “The October-December data on India's growth threw up a divergent trend, with the GVA growth moderating broadly on expected lines and the GDP expanding higher than anticipated," said Aditi Nayar, chief economist, ICRA. Read this report and accompanying charts to know more.
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