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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Blissful ignorance -Jayati Ghosh

Blissful ignorance -Jayati Ghosh

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published Published on Feb 2, 2022   modified Modified on Feb 4, 2022

-The Telegraph

The Union budget is an embodiment of unequal fiscal policy

The finance minister and her ministry have betrayed, once again, their lack of understanding of the Indian economy or the conditions under which most Indians are living today. Despite attempts to ‘talk up’ the supposed recovery, the economy is weak and most people are hurting.

India has seen one of the biggest increases in the number of poor and hungry people in the world in recent years. The data on employment are horrific, especially for a country that was supposed to gain from a demographic dividend. Private investment is sluggish despite the massive and repeated incentives being thrown the way of some big corporates. Public spending during the pandemic has been miserly and very inadequate, making India an outlier even among other middle-income countries. This has deprived most Indians of their basic socio-economic rights and essential public services during a period of health crisis and economic devastation.

A major underlying problem is the lack of domestic demand, which was already weak before the pandemic hit as mass consumption had been falling. This reflects the most fundamental conditions of employment and livelihood: micro, small and medium enterprises that employ the bulk of the Indian workforce are collapsing; agriculturalists continue to suffer; hardly any new jobs are being created for the tens of millions of young people who have gone through tertiary education in the hope of bettering their prospects. Meanwhile, both public health and education services have been battered, pointing to a worrying trajectory for the future.

If the finance ministry were seriously concerned about all of this, we would have had a very different budget — one that would focus on reviving the MSMEs, addressing the concerns of farmers, significantly expanding the rural employment guarantee programme and beginning a national urban public employment programme, dramatically increasing outlays in health and education to enable wider social recovery from the pandemic and make up for the years of severe neglect. We have got none of this. The areas that remain crucial for people’s well-being and livelihood and, by extension, for the regeneration of mass demand remain massively underfunded with some critical sectors even receiving lower allocations than before.

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The Telegraph, 2 February, 2022, https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/blissful-ignorance-the-union-budget-is-an-embodiment-of-unequal-fiscal-policy/cid/1850107


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