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Shailesh Gandhi makes important points in connection to the allocation of land in Maharashtra at a tiny fraction of the market value. “Property belonging to the State belongs to all citizens. All Indians pay taxes directly or indirectly. The rich often think since they pay more, they have greater rights. It is often forgotten that the real estate and lands of …

Minerals are only one part of Intergenerational Equity. Jean Pisani makes a persuasive argument that we are making our children worse off.

GF letter to Goa Govt & CEC on GMPF & DMF (5.2 MB) In the 2012 Goa mining case (WP 435 of 2012), the Supreme Court had ordered the setting up of a Goa Iron Ore Permanent Fund on grounds of Intergenerational Equity and Sustainable Development. The Goa Government was tasked with formulating the scheme for the Permanent Fund in consultation …

Reform Scotland, a think tank in Scotland has proposed a Universal Basic Income. Andrew Whittaker has a nice article in The Scotsman

For the first time, the UK Parliament may debate a  Basic Income. You would expect Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell to support this.

The Jacobin magazine has a number of articles about Basic Income. The Right to a Dignified Life by Jesse A. Myerson and The Wrong Kind of UBI by Shannon Ikebe have useful discussions on the appropriate design of the Universal Basic Income. In particular, they argue that the UBI is not a substitute to other social programmes such as disability benefits, free …

Here are a few reports on UBI. A Retrospective on the Negative Income Tax experiments by Karl Widerquist looks at four experiments conducted in the US in the early 1970s. The Town with No Poverty by Evelyn L Forget of the University of Manitoba, Canada re-examines the data from the Mincome experiment conducted in the town of Dauphin, Manitoba, Canada Creative Citizen, …

A new book by Anthony Atkinson, Inequality, What Can Be Done? links the growing inequality worldwide to changes in power structures. Here’s a good review by Robert Kuttner in The American Prospect.

Joe Matthews in the Sacramento Bee explains how the idea of a Universal Basic Income has been actively discussed in California.

The Center for Science and Environment has issued a scathing critique of the DMF rules issued by the Goa Government. “The draft Rules were kept in the public domain for exactly four days before being finalized.” “A review by CSE shows that the Rules remain problematic in key aspects that are critical for effective functioning of DMF. “The Rules will …