Frameworks, indices and policy instruments that explain the economic news. 336 concepts, each with its definition, key details and a timeline of every news story that touched it.
The Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) is a six-member committee that decides India's main interest rate, the repo rate. When the MPC changes this rate...
The GST Council is a body of the Union Finance Minister and the finance ministers of all states. It decides the main rules of the Goods and Services Tax...
Climate-resilient agriculture means farming in a way that can survive and recover from the shocks of a changing climate, like heat waves, droughts, floods...
Imported inflation is a rise in prices inside a country that comes from outside the country. It happens when the things a country buys from abroad become...
National income accounting is the system a country uses to measure the size of its economy and how it changes. Its most famous number is Gross Domestic...
The World Economic Outlook, or WEO, is a report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that tells the world how fast the global economy and each country's...
Disinvestment means the government selling some or all of its shares in a company it owns. These companies are called Public Sector Enterprises (PSEs) or...
The National Social Assistance Programme (NSAP) is the Union government's main scheme to give a small, regular cash pension to the poorest old people...
The interest rate differential is simply the gap between the interest rates of two countries. For India, the gap that matters most is the one with the...
The Lakhpati Didi initiative is a central government effort to help women in rural Self-Help Groups earn at least ₹1 lakh a year for their household, and...
Poverty measurement in India means deciding who counts as poor and how many such people there are. For most of India's history after Independence, this was...
Under GST, not every sale is taxed. Some goods and services carry no GST at all, but they reach that 'zero' in different ways. Some are exempt by a...
The Multidimensional Poverty Index, or MPI, is a way of measuring poverty by looking at what people actually lack in their daily lives, not only how much...
Purchasing power parity (PPP) is a way of comparing the size of economies, or the living standards of people, after adjusting for the fact that the same...
Every rupee a government spends falls into one of two baskets. Revenue expenditure is the money spent to run the government from day to day: salaries...
Bharat Stage (BS) norms are the rules that fix how much pollution a new vehicle is allowed to release from its exhaust pipe in India. The government sets...
The Central Electricity Authority (CEA) is the Central Government's top technical body for electricity. It plans how much electricity India will need in the...
The Directive Principles of State Policy (DPSPs) are a set of goals and guidelines in the Constitution that tell the government what kind of society it...
The Cash Reserve Ratio is the share of a bank's deposits that it must keep as cash with the Reserve Bank of India. The bank cannot lend this money and earns...
Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency (CAFE) norms are rules that make every car company keep the average fuel use, and so the average carbon dioxide (CO2)...
Treasury Bills, or T-bills, are very short-term loans that the Government of India takes from the market. They last for less than one year. The government...
The PM Gati Shakti National Master Plan is a digital, map-based platform that brings all the government's infrastructure plans onto one screen. Roads...
The Export Credit Guarantee Corporation, now called ECGC Ltd., is a government-owned company that protects Indian exporters if a foreign buyer does not pay....
An inverted duty structure is a situation where the tax on what a business buys (its inputs) is higher than the tax on what it sells (its output). For...
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is a global organisation of 191 member countries that works to keep the world's money system stable. It watches the...
The National Logistics Policy (NLP) is the government's plan to make moving goods across India cheaper, faster and more reliable. While the PM Gati Shakti...
An e-way bill (electronic way bill) is a digital document that must be created on a government portal before goods worth more than ₹50,000 are moved from...
A gas-based economy means a country where natural gas supplies a large share of the energy used by homes, vehicles, factories and power plants. India has...
Green ammonia is ammonia (NH3) made using green hydrogen, which is hydrogen produced by splitting water with electricity from renewable sources like solar...
The National Payments Corporation of India, or NPCI, is the organisation that builds and runs most of India's retail digital payment systems. UPI, RuPay...
The Shipbuilding Financial Assistance Policy (SBFAP) is a Government of India scheme that gives Indian shipyards a cash support of a fixed percentage of the...
Hydrogen blending means mixing a small amount of hydrogen gas into natural gas and sending the mixture through the existing gas pipes. Homes, hotels and...
The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is a number that tracks how the prices of things a normal family buys change over time. These include food, clothes, rent...
The Wholesale Price Index (WPI) tracks how the prices of goods change when they are sold in bulk, that is, by producers and wholesalers, before they reach...
A Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) is a very large set of rechargeable batteries connected to the power grid. It stores electricity when there is too...
A Farmer Producer Organisation, or FPO, is a group of farmers who come together and form their own registered business. The farmers are its members and...
The EU Emissions Trading System, or EU ETS, is the European Union's carbon market. It sets a limit on how much greenhouse gas big polluters can release in...
Agricultural diversification means a farm or a country growing and earning from a wider mix of products instead of depending on one or two crops. It can...
The base effect is the impact that last year's number has on this year's growth rate. Inflation in India is reported as a year-on-year change: this month's...
India has set itself clear goals to produce more of its electricity from clean sources like the sun, wind, water and nuclear power, and less from coal. The...
The Price Stabilisation Fund (PSF) is a government fund used to keep the prices of some key farm products, mainly pulses and onion, from jumping too high...
Plant Load Factor, or PLF, tells us how much electricity a power plant actually produced compared to the most it could have produced if it ran at full power...
India's exchange rate is the price of the rupee in terms of other currencies, for example how many rupees one US dollar costs. In India, this price is...
Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) are businesses that are small in size, such as a village flour mill, a tailoring shop, a small auto-parts...
The Periodic Labour Force Survey, or PLFS, is India's main official survey of jobs and unemployment. Government survey teams visit homes across the country...
Currency hedging means protecting yourself against a sudden change in the exchange rate. A business or investor who will need or receive dollars in the...
The Green Revolution was a big jump in India's food production that began in the mid-1960s. It came from using new high-yielding seeds of wheat and rice...
A Non-Deliverable Forward (NDF) is a contract that lets someone bet on, or protect against, the future value of a currency without ever exchanging that...
Green steel is steel made with very little or almost no release of carbon dioxide (CO2), the main gas causing climate change. Normal steel making burns huge...
Micro-irrigation means giving water to crops in small, controlled amounts, directly near the plant, instead of flooding the whole field. The two main types...
A National Steel Policy is a long-term plan made by the Government of India for the steel industry. It sets targets for how much steel India should be able...
Biofortification means breeding food crops so that the edible part of the plant (the grain, the tuber, the fruit) naturally contains more vitamins and...
Food fortification means adding extra vitamins and minerals to commonly eaten foods while they are being processed. For example, iodine is added to salt...
Groundwater is the water stored underground in the cracks and pores of soil and rock, in layers called aquifers. Farmers and towns pull it up using wells...
Artificial intelligence (AI) is computer software that can do tasks that once needed human thinking, such as writing, translating, summarising, spotting...
Foreign exchange reserves (forex reserves) are the foreign money and other safe international assets that a country's central bank keeps aside. In India...
The National Mission on Edible Oils – Oilseeds (NMEO-Oilseeds) is a central government scheme meant to help India grow more of its own edible oil, so it...
Oil Marketing Companies, or OMCs, are the companies that sell petroleum products to the public. They run the petrol pumps, deliver LPG cylinders to homes...
The Impossible Trinity is a basic rule of international economics. It says a country cannot have all three of these things at the same time: a fixed...
A just transition means moving from a polluting, fossil fuel based economy to a clean, low-carbon economy in a way that is fair to everyone. 'Just' here...