-The Indian Express The March 4 letter said that FCI, Zonal Office (N), Noida, has directed that land records are a must for wheat procurement in RMS 2021-22. Jalandhar: The Food Corporation of India’s (FCI) Punjab office on Thursday wrote to the director of food, civil supplies and consumer affairs seeking land records of farmers so as to make direct online payment of Minimum Support Price (MSP) to their Bank Accounts from...
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Fiscal transparency jacks up ‘expenditure’ numbers in the Union Budget 2021-22
In order to understand why the Union Budget 2021-22 is being termed as ‘transparent’, it has to be read simultaneously with the 15th Finance Commission Main Report for 2021-26. But first, let us discuss 'fertilizer subsidy'. The budget documents for Union Budget 2021-22 show that the spending on ‘fertilizer subsidy’ was slashed from Rs. 1,33,947 crore in 2020-21 (revised estimate) to Rs. 79,530 crore in 2021-22 (budget estimate). However, the budgetary...
More »Banks red-flag: Loans to street vendors in pandemic turning NPAs -Sandeep Singh and Sunny Verma
-The Indian Express Launched in June to help vendors amid the pandemic, the PM SVANidhi scheme is a micro-credit facility that provides street vendors a collateral-free loan of Rs 10,000 at concessional rates of an estimated 7.25%. After being nudged by municipalities to step up loan disbursements under the PM Street Vendor’s AtmaNirbhar Nidhi (PM SVANidhi) programme, banks are writing back to report that many of these collateral-free loans are turning into...
More »Govt should next focus on well-being of the child from womb to first five years -Abhishek Anand , Vikas Dimble and Arvind Subramanian
-The Indian Express India continues to be successful in preventing child deaths, but the health and nutrition of the surviving, living child has deteriorated, somewhat worryingly. The recently released fifth round of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) provides new and reliable evidence to assess some dimensions of micro-development performance before COVID struck. The survey covers health, nutrition (of mother and child) and the overall quality of lives. In a recent piece on...
More »In rural India, over-reliance on digital technology has worsen financial exclusion -Rajendran Narayanan and Sakina Dhorajiwala
-The Indian Express A technological intervention must have a governance framework in which protection of rights must be fundamental and which provides more choices to the marginalised. Remember the early days of the internet, when it took several minutes to connect to the web through a dial-in modem? Or when you had to wait in line at an STD booth to make an outstation call? Since then, we have made massive strides...
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