Articles by Sugata Marjit

Notwithstanding methodological differences, the findings of successive reports on the socio-economic conditions of Muslims in West Bengal show a significant improvement of the community in the state. Muslim majority districts such as Murshidabad and Malda show better performance of some socio-economic indicators like literacy and employment in government jobs than the non-Muslim population among the surveys.

West Bengal is facing dire fiscal and financial stringency. Bengal is compared to Andhra Pradesh in order to understand its revenue-generating capacity. A new approach that uses National Sample Survey Office data on consumption expenditure is used to decompose the aggregate consumption data of each state to estimate tax collection for each commodity group. It is found that some part of West Bengal's poor tax realisation may be due to unusually low per capita consumption of some commodities that are important for taxation. The discrepancy might be related to a larger informal sector, and thereby, under-reporting of actual consumption, or genuine consumption behaviour reflecting a different intra- and inter-temporal preference structure. This opens up new avenues for future research.

The 24x7 Fair Price Medicine Shops in the public hospitals of West Bengal have visibly reduced the average price of critical medicine and appliances. Their services should now be extended beyond hospitals so that they reach out to a larger share of patients.  

An auction process for sale of public assets will not be completely corruption-free but if properly designed and implemented it will actually minimise the likelihood of manipulation. Why then is a government headed by an economist worried about taking the auction route?

Kalyan Sanyal was trained as a trade theorist in the mid-1970s and initially made many signifi cant contributions in the fi eld. But he later abandoned neoclassical economics to turn to a study of the Marxian approach to development. An appreciation by a former younger colleague who has an intellectual debt to Sanyal's work in trade theory.