Through the Looking Glass

  What the numbers say—how men and women spend their day differently; and how much bijli, sadak, paani can improve productivity Here’s a question that has been of interest to me: in a country of 1.4 billion people, if only approximately 400 million are in the workforce, what is it that the remaining billion people do? We now have some answers. Time Use Survey 2019, compiled and released by the Ministry of Statistics and Planning Implementation (MOSPI) reveals interesting data about the pattern of time use by Indians. This is how the day of an “average” Indian goes. (Yes, there is no average Indian person – this is the average of the times spent across men and women in rural and urban India.) Out of the 24 hours in a day, almost exactly half is spent in “self-care and maintenance” – this leaves only 12 hours, which is typically used for these five activities: employment and related activities (2.7 hours), unpaid domestic services for household members (2.2 hours), culture, l...

Financial Express As States issue more debt, finding the investors who will subscribe to the issue will require expanding the current pool of investors and making the investment more lucrative While there have been many deliberations in these pages on the growing amount of debt that the various tiers of the government (Centre and States) will have to raise, little discussion has gone into who they will raise the funds from. It is left to the all-encompassing term: ‘market borrowing’. We deep-dive to see who constitutes this market and what policy implications arise.  Every September, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) releases a treasure trove of data: Handbook of Statistics on the Indian Economy. While there are many aspects of interest in this data release, we will specifically focus on tables 113 and 114. The former details the “Combined Liabilities of Central and State Governments” and the latter, “Ownership of Central and State Government Securities”. These annual data releases o...

In 2015, I was summoned to the North Block from the office of the then Minister of State for Finance, Jayant Sinha. For somebody who worked in a bank, my first thought was that some hell had broken loose somewhere; I may have written something that was a slip-up or something. We ended up having a one-hour long conversation and that was it. Nothing happened; life moved on as usual. Then, in 2016, I received another call that I now think possibly changed the trajectory of my career path and maybe, even life. I was asked if I want to work with Mr Sinha as the Officer on Special Duty. After mulling over it, it was decided that I will work with him for 18-24 months—even after Mr Sinha moved from the Ministry of Finance to the Ministry of Civil Aviation.  Why? I wanted to explore the world of policy. Such opportunities are hard to come by.  Besides, it’s where I learnt two of the biggest lessons that I now see panning out around us these days, especially during the debates on the #F...