Articles by Manish Kumar

The attempts to disparate the state governments’ expenditure on subsidies by the votaries of the neo-liberal fiscal regime, do not stand the scrutiny of facts and reason. The use of terms like “freebies” and “revadi culture” is an assault by the state-capital nexus on the lives of millions of working people, by keeping them vulnerable in order to discipline them, as an integral part of the neo-liberal agenda.

Erasing the Binary Distinction of Developed and Underdeveloped: A Comparative Study of the Emergence of the Large-scale Steel Industry in Imperial Russia, Imperial Britain, Imperial America, and Colonial India, 1880–1914 by Vinay Bahl, US: Shunya, 2019; pp 417, price not indicated.

Outmigration from Bihar in search of livelihood has been normalised over several decades, with Bihar being one of the topmost states of origin for the migrants. Unemployment rate in Bihar remains higher than the country average. Agriculture has become unviable over the years due to low yields, increasing landlessness and lack of financial support by the state. The return migration to the state in the wake of COVID-19 necessitates that the state generate farm and non-farm employment to address the crisis situation.

In the last 25 years, the Indian petroleum sector has gone through several structural changes. Each stage of these reforms has favoured private sector companies, signifying a loosening of government control on the sector that had been asserted through investing in public sector oil companies in the 1970s.