economists-from-india

"It’s very easy, for instance, to cure Alzheimer’s in mice. But those things don’t translate to humans."

"One of the lessons I’ve learned during the pandemic…the mistake I saw over and over again was this desire to use science communications to manipulate the public, to vastly underestimate the capacity of the public to understand nuance, and oversimplify and demonize who disagreed with the public health message as if they were somehow the enemy. I think all of those things breed distrust, it miseducates the public about what science is learning and discovering and what it is not learning and discovering, and if it impinges on people’s lives in ways that end up hurting them (like their children can’t go to school for years and they’re depressed or they’re addicted to opioids after their doctors and everyone are telling them that these things can’t get your addicted, they’re fired from their job on the premise COVID stops you from spreading COVID). All of these things are the fruits of a paradigm that views scientific communication as something which ought to lord over you rather than something which helps you decide how to make good decisions about your life. Essentially, we created a class of unclean people as a matter of public policy. You can understand why people who went through that would say, 'Given that the vaccine didn't turn out to stop you from getting and spreading COVID, why should I trust you on anything else?' That, that's where we currently are. [T]he problem here is that the scientific community embraced an ethical norm about unity of messaging and then enforced it on fellow scientists. And then it cooperated with the Biden administration to put in place a censorship regime that made it impossible even for legitimate conversations [e.g., about vaccine injuries] to happen. There was essentially a groupthink at scale. It was impossible to organize a panel with the kind of diversity of opinion that was needed. There were [a] million or more — I know this from the set of people who signed the Great Barrington Declaration, tens of thousands of scientists and doctors who disagreed [with the lockdowns], but they were afraid to stick their head up for fear of getting chopped off. It's not an accident that Stanford didn't allow a scientific panel with my point of view about the efficacy of lockdowns until 2024."

"This censorship activity killed people… The reality is that the First Amendment, if it had been actually in place during the pandemic, would have saved lives. It would have led to less damage, less destruction, fewer people dead."

"The First Amendment still doesn’t apply in practice... Free speech rights exist right now only because the administration has chosen to allow them, not because the First Amendment is protecting us. ... Why would I be put on a blacklist by Twitter?... Why would a private company, whose money is made by people communicating with each other, decide to put me on a blacklist? It turns out the answer is the government forced them to do it.... Science depends on free speech... If we silence debate, we silence discovery. And if the First Amendment cannot be enforced, then it is still a dead letter.... Right now, free speech in America depends on who is in power... That’s a perilous place to be."

"Many are saying these projected numbers by Ramanan Laxminarayan will cause panic. I disagree. I think him telling us that India could get 300 to 500 million #Corona cases by July is a call to action. It brings home gravity of what could happen if we don't isolate diligently."

"Our initial estimates showed that 300 million to 500 million Indians were likely to be infected with the coronavirus by the end of July. Most of the cases would be without symptoms or with mild infections, but about a tenth — 30 million to 50 million — would most likely be severe."

"Some don’t want lockdowns because of the economic and human costs. But they also don’t want there to be a flood of cases into hospitals. Perhaps they are counting on chloroquine or BCG vaccination to save the day. Unfortunately, Covid-19 cannot be dealt with through wishful thinking."

"Dr Ramanan Laxminarayan suggests that if mathematical models applied in US & UK were applied to India, we could be looking at 300 million #Covid19 infections."

"Ever since 1951, "the propor­tion of Mus­lims has been gradually but steadily increa­sing every decade by roughly one percentage point"­."

"The Ganga’s southward drift was arrested only when it nudged into the Vindhyas near Chunar. It is the only place in the plains where a hill commands such a view over the river, making Chunar fort a coveted strategic location"

"Aurobindo’s change of direction may seem inexplicable, but his writings explain his reasons. He seems to have come to the conclusion that he had already accomplished his role as India’s Mazzini by triggering the flame of nationalism. It was now a matter of time before the British were forced to leave. However, he also felt that there was a more important civilizational battle that India would have to fight, which would prove much harder than just gaining political freedom. After centuries under foreign rule, Indians had come to see their own culture from the perspective of those who had conquered them. Many members of the Indian elite had imbibed the idea that sacred texts such as the Vedas and the Upanishads were just superstition—like Aurobindo’s father, they had come to believe modernization meant Westernization. One could argue that this shows incredible foresight, as more than a century later, seven and a half decades after gaining political freedom, this remains a matter of hot debate in contemporary India. He felt that it was his duty to rediscover the true core of Indian civilization and present it to Indians and the wider world. With this in mind, Sri Aurobindo dived deep into the Rig Veda, the most ancient and revered of Hindu texts."

"Not many people realize that India is host to one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world. It is believed that the earliest Jews came to India to trade in the time of King Solomon but, after the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 AD, many refugees settled in Kerala. St. Thomas the Apostle is said to have landed in Muzaris at around this time and lived amongst the community."

"“Indian history is not what we have been taught to believe” and that people are led to feel that the Indian had “no agency in world history”.“To change the narrative of who Indians were historically, see, one of the things I’ve been trying to do and not just through this project, I’ve been writing these history books, is to show that Indian history is not what we have been taught to believe”, he said. “That it’s not the case that Indians were somehow a passive people sitting in India waiting for conquerors to come and give us civilisation and that we have no agency. This is not a history at all”, Sanyal added. “A very little bit of digging into our own history will show us that this is not our history. We have a history. We’ve got a rambunctious history of adventurers and mercenaries and doing all kinds of interesting things”, he said. “One of the things we did was very early on, long before even the Phoenicians, who are famous mariners of history, we were sailing during Harappan times to the Middle East. The seals were found in Mesopotamia”, he said. “We had a port at Lothal and Dholavira and all of these places. But even later, it continues. And that’s why they were sailing out to Indonesia. They were sailing all the way through to Korea”, he said. “In fact, Korean history actually begins with the marriage of a local prince to a princess from Ayodhya”. He added that the legacy of such connections endures to this generation. “The Macaulay mindset is not really about Macaulay the person. What it really is about is this psychological idea that we have imbibed into our nervous system, almost, that we are somehow functioning because civilisation was given to us by other people and that we have never had agency”, he said. “So, okay, the Mughals came and built the Taj Mahal. That’s fine. You know, the British can come and do something, but we should not do anything. So now this is imbued into us in a very fundamental way”, Sanyal said. He added that this attitude continues to shape public discourse even today. “It showed through, for example, when we wanted to build a new Parliament”, he said, underlining how deeply rooted the mindset remains in contemporary thinking."

"If Sher Shah had lived longer, it is possible that we would not remember the Mughal rule as anything more than one more Central Asian raid."

"The term ‘majoritarianism’ is used in India as a convenient way to demonise Hindus without any reference to first principles."

"There will always be a gap between the goals set down and scheme of implementation. Women's groups by now have enough data to know where the policies have gone wrong. The whole question is gathering enough political clout to make a change."

"Our very limited interaction with NGOs active in this field in Tamil Nadu reveal that a large number of abortions take place outside the formal system since very often the state through its family planning outlets tries its own morality on women seeking abortions."

"Health and education have never been called freebies. No Indian government has ever denied them. So classifying education and health as freebies, Kerjiwal is trying to bring in a sense of worry and fear in minds of poor. There should be a genuine debate on this matter."

"It was in Rajan’s time as Governor of the RBI that loans were given just based on phone calls from crony leaders and public sector banks in India till today are depending on the government’s equity infusion to get out of that mire."

"I have just seen the statements by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman. I won't like to comment on that statement, but before one can fix the economy, one needs a correct diagnosis of its ailments and their causes. The government is obsessed with trying to fix blame on its opponent, thus it is unable to find a solution that will ensure revival of the economy."

"I don't eat a lot of onions and garlic, so don't worry. I come from a family that doesn't care much for onions."

"The Western nations have four arms-defensive and offensive-the Army, the Navy, the Air Force and the Church."

"The Gandhian philosophy is not only practiced in our daily lives but also incorporated in policymaking of the country."

"Overcome all challenges and turn them into beautiful possibilities in life."

"The appointment of the new vc, who is an experienced and brilliant academician, would usher in a new era of academic excellence in the lone institute of higher education of the state."

"Alumni are the brand-ambassadors of the institution they graduated from."

"Gathering that the hard work of the coaches and trainers are reflected through the performance of the players under them."

"Just as in the 1930s, world capitalism, as it had existed until then, had reached a dead-end, and the need for it to be altered for the sake of preserving the system itself, was emphasised by many perceptive bourgeois thinkers, exactly in a similar manner contemporary world capitalism too has reached a dead-end and cannot continue as before. [...] Any change in capitalism, however, including a revival of the so-called "" of the period, will entail a loosening of the hegemony of international and hence will face stiff opposition from it. The fact that the need for such change is clear to bourgeois thinkers, does not mean that finance capital will simply voluntarily make a sacrifice of the hegemony it currently enjoys. Indeed the history of the 1930s itself bears witness to this fact. [...] Boosting for overcoming mass unemployment finally got accepted as government policy only after the war when the weight of the working class in the advanced countries became much greater than before (of which the victory of the Labour Party in the British post-war elections and the vastly increased strength of the and Italy were obvious markers), and when the came right up to the very doorsteps of creating fears of a “communist takeover”. This conjuncture finally forced concessions from finance capital that had been unobtainable till then. Finance capital, in other words, does not voluntarily make concessions even when such concessions are seen by major pro-capitalist thinkers as being essential for the preservation of the system itself."

"It is real-life class struggle, informed no doubt by ideas, that ultimately determines which way the world will move. Hence even for altering contemporary capitalism in the direction of the so-called “welfare capitalism” of yore, it would be essential to have the working class fighting for such an agenda. But when it does so, and when international finance capital resists such an agenda, we would be in the thick of class struggle. Time alone will tell whether this struggle would remain merely at the level of achieving a revival of “welfare capitalism” or whether it would go beyond capitalism altogether towards a socialist alternative. Once class struggle, for changing the system in its present form, acquires momentum, its outcome would depend on praxis and may not necessarily remain bounded within the system itself."

"A sound anti-poverty strategy should not only aim to increase s, but also provide the poor with a variety of assets — personal, social, political and environmental to help them overcome human poverty."

"The concept of human poverty also entails the recognition of as an essential part of poverty. Measures of income-poverty are usually made at the household level and do not capture intra-household disparities. A gendered approach to human poverty would involve examining how resources such as food, education, health services, and productive assets are distributed within the household."

"The Hindutva movement as it has emerged is, almost in a classical sense, Fascist in its ideology, Fascist in its class support, Fascist in its method, and Fascist in its program. All the ingredients of a Fascist ideology are present in it: the attempt to unify the majority under a homogenized concept, 'the Hindus'; a sense of grievance against alleged injustices done to this homogeneous group in the past by an excluded homogeneous minority; a sense of cultural superiority vis-à-vis this minority; a reinterpretation of history exclusively in these terms; a total rejection of contrary evidence, of dispassionate analysis, of the scientific method, indeed of rational discourse; and above all an appeal to the so-called homogeneous majority in passionate, blood-curdling, and essentially male chauvinist terms to 'stand up', 'assert their manhood', 'show that it is blood and not water that flows in their veins', all of which amount to an incitement violence, and result in actual violence, against the minority group. … Its appeal is based not on the dreams of a better or more prosperous or meaningful future, but upon hatred."

"Far from the pay cheques of employees coming out of the budget, the government has robbed s of workers, including 14 crore migrant workers (of whom around 10 crore are inter-state migrants), of their incomes, jobs and accommodations, without giving a paisa by way of compensation. This is partly no doubt the result of the utter inhumanity of the Modi government; but partly also it expresses its utter pusillanimity vis-à-vis finance capital, which it seeks to sustain through negating and and promoting a communal agenda that aims to divide people. But following the same track as was being followed in the "last four decades" and not recognising the dead-end of neo-liberalism, also means remaining stuck in that dead-end, which in turn would mean even greater recourse to authoritarian-fascistic measures and even more odious attempts to promote a communal divide. The working people will have to struggle against this entire endeavour and to show the way out of the dead-end of neo-liberalism."

"The abrogation of labour laws in -ruled states (which could not have been done without Modi’s approval) is meant to make the more insecure rather than less. Some officers were punished recently for even suggesting that higher taxes should be collected from the rich. In short, the Modi government in its mindlessness is still picking up the intellectual crumbs that had fallen from the of the metropolitan establishment “four decades” ago, without realising that the world has moved on."

"The ruling formation in India, however, is totally oblivious of the world conjuncture. The dead-end of neo-liberalism, which is visible to even bourgeois thinkers in the metropolis, is invisible to our ' brigade. Not only is the Modi government still wedded to the neo-liberal agenda in general, but it has not even deviated from this agenda in the midst of the acute humanitarian crisis unleashed by the pandemic and its own mindless response to it."

"The vast majority of India’s poor rely on daily for sustenance. With the current lockdown and its likely extension, millions of daily labourers and their families can no longer earn the money they need to survive. In this unprecedented situation, the Indian state must respond swiftly to prevent widespread acute hunger. [...] The health and economic threats posed by the pandemic are unprecedented: India must capitalise upon its preparedness to address food insecurity and prioritise food distribution to protect the health and welfare of its most vulnerable citizens."

"“I have said to these English channels that if there is an issue of national import, and not a local/Delhi issue, I don’t want to be there with an AAP guy. These channels — Times Now, NDTV and India Today — try to push these guys. What locus standi do they have? I just don’t understand. Basically it is to build up (a controversy to malign the government). This is something unusual. It cannot be that they can’t find anybody else. What I strongly feel and object to is that the news is much more biased than it has ever been. I have a lot of evidence to support that.”"

"“this is a bravado that comes out of a sinking ship,”"

"“The consistency in the approach of mainstream media suggests there is coordination going on. Each person is not doing an investigation.”"

"[The head of Oxus Investments finds Times Now given the most to hyperventilation followed by NDTV and India Today.] “They are immensely biased; they need to be exposed.”"

"For nearly twenty of his years in London, he was known as a close supporter of the communists. People change their minds, but Mr. Menon's recent speeches do not suggest that he has changed his. I should guess that be is one of that considerable band of people in important positions in the free world who, though not technically party members, are in fact disciplined communists. Even if this is disputed, it will be agreed that there is something anomalous in a convinced partisan of the aggressor masquerading as a neutral mediator, and contriving so regularly to serve the aggressor's purposes. I hope people will not think I am suffering from a conspiracy mania; after all, Communism is a conspiracy."

"Within Nehru’s Congress Party government the KGB set out to cultivate its leading left-wing firebrand and Nehru’s close adviser, Krishna Menon, who became Minister of Defence in 1957 after spending most of the previous decade as, successively, Indian High Commissioner in London and representative at the United Nations. To the Soviet Foreign Minister, Andrei Gromyko, ‘It was … plain that [Menon] was personally friendly to the Soviet Union. He would say to me heatedly: “You cannot imagine the hatred the Indian people felt and still feel to the colonialists, the British … The methods used by American capital to exploit the backward countries may be oblique, but they’re just as harsh.” ’"

"In May 1962 the Soviet Presidium (which under Khrushchev replaced the Politburo) authorized the KGB residency in New Delhi to conduct active-measures operations designed to strengthen Menon’s position in India and enhance his personal popularity, probably in the hope that he would become Nehru’s successor... Menon’s career, however, was disrupted by the Chinese invasion of India in October 1962. Having failed to take the prospect of invasion seriously until the eve of the attack, Menon found himself made the scapegoat for India’s unpreparedness. Following the rout of Indian forces by the Chinese, Nehru reluctantly dismissed him on 31 October. A fortnight later, the Presidium authorized active measures by the Delhi residency, including secret finance for a newspaper which supported Menon, in a forlorn attempt to resuscitate his political career. Though similar active measures by the KGB in Menon’s favour before the 1967 election also had little observable effect, a secret message to Menon from the CPSU Central Committee (probably sent by its International Department) expressed appreciation for his positive attitude to the Soviet Union."

"The survival of our democracy and the unity and integrity of the nation depend upon the realisation that constitutional morality is no less essential than constitutional legality. Dharma lives in the hearts of public men; when it dies there, no Constitution, no law, no amendment, can save it."

"India is like a donkey carrying a sack of gold. The donkey does not know what it is carrying but is content to go along with its load on the back."

"Bills to create three new states have finally been passed by Parliament. Of these, only the formation of Jharkhand out of Bihar can be said to be the outcome of a long, long struggle. Chhattisgarh and Uttaranchal, for instance, do not find any mention in the report of the States Reorganisation Commission that was submitted 45 years ago. What is intriguing about Uttaranchal is that it has given three great chief ministers to Uttar Pradesh in the past 50 years - Govind Ballabh Pant, Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna and Narain Dutt Tiwari - and yet the region felt neglected. Similarly, Chhattisgarh produced many noted political leaders, three of whom - Ravi Shankar Shukla, Shyama Charan Shukla and Motilal Vora - became chief ministers of Madhya Pradesh. Two other chief ministers, D.P. Mishra and Arjun Singh, contested from Chhattisgarh. Yet this region too felt unwanted. New voices are being heard. Fresh demands for Bodoland out of Assam, Vidarbha out of Maharashtra, Gorkhaland out of West Bengal and Telengana out of Andhra Pradesh are being made. And since Uttaranchal does not solve the problem of Uttar Pradesh's simply ungovernable size, some cries for a further break-up of India's most populous state are also being raised."

"They (CAG auditors) are the best in the world. Both developing and developed countries send their auditors to train with us at our academies. Effectiveness and robustness of our processes have led us to being appointed auditor for global agencies."

"We are not in the business of finding faults. But when we detect some loopholes during the process of audit, we advise the executive to plug those loopholes."

"We cannot do the role of cheerleaders. We strive to provide objective feedback on the functioning of the various departments of the government."

"We are incapable of making fundamental errors as being discussed in media. Our report will make clear all doubts on fallacies (that are) being talked about."