The Budget provides proof of the United Progressive Alliance government having forgotten the importance of its own “flagship schemes”. BUDGET 2012-13 provides conclusive proof that the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government has lost its way. It has managed the remarkable feat of upsetting almost everyone and making no one happy. The Budget is highly regressive in both taxation and spending terms and will raise prices of essentials, so aam aurat and...

-The Business Standard Searching for independent assessments of govt work The rural development ministry recently proposed “independent, real-time evaluation” of the government’s flagship social welfare and development programmes, a suggestion that deserves attention not just for its pros, but also for its cons. It is true that given the explosive growth in social sector spending, effective monitoring and evaluation are ever more important. The constant hum of charges that extra money is...

-Economic and Political Weekly   Budget 2012, built yet again at the altar of fiscal fundamentalism, will not convince anybody. In this era of immediate assessment it took just a few minutes for the Union Budget for 2012-13 to be given one or the other negative appellation – “lacklustre”, “anti-growth”, “back to the 1980s”, “without reform” and the like. Such evaluations forget that union budgets have long since ceased to be statements of...

-The Economic Times World Bank has said it will extend full financial support to India to help enhance the abysmal level of infrastructural development in the country in the 12th Five Year Plan that begins next fiscal.  The World Bank president Robert B Zoellick, who begins his fifth and last official visit to India on Monday, has expressed intent to discuss innovative methods of financing with Indian leaders during his stay.  "India's needs...

One man’s fiscal problem is another man’s lifeline. Trigger happy bureaucrats and economists may love shooting down subsidies because it bloats the fiscal deficit and burdens the government but the simple fact is that in a one billion strong nation, in which nearly one in every three live below the poverty line, one needs an effective and efficient method through which privileged tax payers can support the poor. Last week, finance...