Vivek's Commentary

2014 Loksabha election has made a tremendous impact on Indian Politics. The rise of Narendra Modi has changed the political equation at national as well as sub-national level. In this article, I will try to understand the changes in the voting pattern by constructing the indicators.  The main change which is being witnessed is that India is moving towards new hegemony in Indian Politics (Palshikar (2018). This is contradictory to the political movement of the Indian democracy, Before 2014, Indian democracy was moving towards convergence from hegemony which means that in political competition the dominance of the single dominated players gets reduced (Palshikar and Yadav (2003)). This is also getting reflected in the voter's behavior where voters are looking for single dominated party and dominated leader.  To understand the changes in the voting pattern, I have constructed Gallagher’s index given by Gallagher (1991) and Effective Number of Political Parties developed b...

I just finished the book called “Gas Wars: Crony Capitalism and the Ambanis” written by Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, Subir Ghosh and Jyotirmoy Chaudhuri. The book explained the relationship between RIL (Reliance Industries Limited) and government especially the relationship between energy minister, petroleum minister and RIL. These ministers were working for RIL and if you observe that these energy and petroleum minister held their position continuously for five years which are exceptional cases for given ministries. In 2014, Reliance must realize the mood of the nation and moved towards BJP. So in this article, I am trying to observe whether the competition in the industries where Mukesh has a stronghold is reduced or not in Post-Modi era. I have calculated the HHI (Herfindahl-Hirschman Index) to measure the competition. The index is calculated by summing the square of the top 10 companies share. If HHI is higher then there is less competition while if HHI is low then competition is hig...

In Q1 of 2019-20 financial year, agriculture, forestry, and fishing sector show the growth of 2% which is a drastic decline. The uncertainty in the prices of agricultural commodities is a known fact. But livestock is a thing which can provide the definite return to the farmer and can be a tool for poverty eradication for landless farmers and agricultural labor. Last year I got an opportunity to conduct a survey and to interact with farmers in the tribal area. I came to know about some success stories where agricultural labor with uncertain income started earning a fixed amount per year due to livestock. There is one interesting difference between agriculture commodity marketing and livestock marketing. Unlike agricultural commodity auction where the buyer (trader) bids for prices, here as far as livestock is concerned, the seller decides the price first and then the buyer according to his/her willingness to pay, buys the animal. But still, people are reluctant to use this tool to in...