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Two recent opinion polls (ABC-CVoter Survey and India Today-Karvy Survey) on the 2019 general elections to Indian Parliament – Lok Sabha and results of recent state elections suggest that the BJP led by Narendra Modi will find it harder to repeat its phenomenal victory of 2014 and the ruling NDA coalition may need a different path to 272+ seats compared to the 2014 elections. Both the opinion polls forecast about 200 seats for the BJP and about 235 seats for the ruling NDA coalition.

Our hypothetical exercise based on extrapolating the votes of BJP and INC in the assembly seats of Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan in the 2018 state assembly elections into their corresponding Lok Sabha constituencies shows that the BJP will likely win around 15 seats in Madhya Pradesh and

India is likely to be characterised by an excess labour supply of ~70mn persons in FY20. From a sectoral perspective, even as the Agricultural and Industrial sectors deal with excess labour supply, the Services sector will be characterised by a shortage of adequately skilled workers.

Even if we assume that India’s real GDP continues to grow at a CAGR of 6.6% p.a. from FY17 until FY20, the supply of labour in India in FY20 at ~500mn persons is likely to exceed the number of jobs that the Indian economy can create at ~430mn. The mismatch

The demonetisation move announced by the Narendra Modi led Government is creating a great deal of inconvenience for the electorate. We had therefore said that we expect the Government to consider launching a Universal Basic Income (UBI) scheme on a pilot basis in FY18.

What is the Concept of Universal Basic Income Scheme ?
Dr. Vijay Joshi in his recent book titled “India’s long road – The search for prosperity” expounds the concept of Universal Basic Income (UBI). According to him, the current system of subsidy disbursements is extremely inefficient since the system has limited success in targeting the deserving and also suffers from leakages. He proposes that a basic income of about

India is among the top-five nations in the world in terms of military capability on most parameters. As per SIPRI, its defence spending was US$51bn in 2015, the sixth highest but significantly lower than the top-two globally with
the USA at US$596bn and China at US$215bn.

In terms of land systems, India has the fourth-highest number of heavy battle-ready tanks after Russia, China and the USA. At 1.3m, India’s active military personnel is the third highest in the world, while China has the highest number of active military personnel at 2.4m. India also has good missile capability with Prithvi missiles, for short-range (less than 600km) surface-to-surface attacks; Agni missiles, for long-range (up to 8,000km) surface-to-surface attacks; Akash and Trishul missiles, for surface-to-air attacks; and Dhanush missiles, for sea-to-sea and sea-to-surface attacks. Also, Brahmos missiles are cruise missiles with a range of 300km that can be launched from