Articles by Abhijit Sen

Trends and Options Abhijit Sen If poverty reduction is to be a serious part of the agenda of economic reforms, the reforms will have to have an explicitly redistributive content. This will require cuts in subsidies to the rich and also higher taxes to maintain and increase the expenditure relevant for the poor. In addition, the old issues of land distribution and provision of universal primary education and health must be put back on the agenda.

The Rupee and Its Malcontents Exchange Rate Management in India Jayati Ghosh Abhijit Sen C P Chandrasekhar The sources of the current instability in the currency markets - portfolio capital inflows from foreign institutional investors, exporters withholding their foreign exchange earnings and reckless imports and import hunching by domestic firms are rendered the more potent because of the reduced ability of the government to intervene effectively, it having discarded many of the instruments it could earlier have used to determine the exchange rate of the rupee. Having tied its own hands so effectively, the government's external economic policy has become a prisoner of speculative forces rather than their master.

Life after Enron Jayati Ghosh Abhijit Sen C P Chandrasekhar The Enron agreement was only one of eight so-called fast track' agreements with multinational companies on terms, essentially dictated by the union ministry of power, which are ruinous for the concerned state governments and for power consumers. However, the danger of focusing only on these specific projects is that attention may be diverted from the more fundamental task of framing a new policy for the power sector. What are the dimensions of the crisis facing the power sector and how can it be resolved? Confusion on these basic issues has led to many reactions to the Enron fiasco which are erroneous and misleading.

Writing about Hindu-Muslim Riots in India Today Gyanendra Pandey The dominant nationalist historiography that insists on the totalising standpoint of a seamless nationalism needs to be challenged not only because of its interested use of categories such as 'national' and 'secular' but also because of its privileging of the so-called 'general' over the particular, the larger over the smaller, the 'mainstream' over the 'marginal