-PTI NEW DELHI: With rise in personal disposable income post 7th Pay Commission, the income tax exemption limit needs to be raised by Rs 50,000 to Rs 3 lakh, a SBI report said on Monday. The move will benefit around 75 lakh people, it said. The SBI's Ecowrap report further said that if the exemption limit of interest payments under housing loan is increased to Rs 2.5 lakhs for existing home loan...

-Livemint.com Rising input costs and lack of remunerative prices have turned the terms of trade against the Indian farmer While the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) managed to retain its stronghold of Gujarat in the recent state assembly elections, it conceded significant ground to the Congress in rural and semi-rural constituencies. The results bring to the fore the problem of rural discontent, as farmers intensify their protests against non-remunerative prices for their produce...

-Livemint.com The trajectory of wealth concentration in the country, not just the levels of recently estimated inequality, is important A flurry of estimates regarding Indian inequality have captured public interest recently. Whether one believes the wealth inequality numbers presented by Credit Suisse or the distributional income accounts by Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty, evidence seems to state that India has high economic disparities. But inequality is to be expected in a developing...

-The Hindu An immediate stimulus is needed to regain the momentum to get India back to 8% growth The government’s move this past week to publish economic data for the April to June quarter of this year needs a look. The real growth of GDP, i.e. after removing the impact of inflation, was only 5.7%, much lower than expected. For the past six consecutive quarters, the growth rate has gone down steadily,...

-TheWire.in Instead of waiting for all the data to come in and making an apples-with-apples comparison, are different numbers being thrown at the public in order to make a political point about the ‘success’ of demonetisation? On August 18, the Ministry of Finance issued a clarification about the number of tax payers that had been added post-demonetisation, hoping to set at rest the confusion – and skepticism – that had resulted from...