-The Indian Express While Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara seeks to recover from the recent disastrous bypoll where the BJP lost two Lok Sabha seats and an assembly seat to the Congress, MP’s three-time CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan aims to mitigate three-time anti-INCumbency. From crop loan and land revenue waivers to bonus payments and free crop storage, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh announced a slew of sops Monday targeting farmers and rural voters...

-The Hindu The answer lies in the fragile state of the Centre’s finances, and its control over interest, pension and subsidy expenses To any layman watching India’s annual Budget jamboree, the entire exercise must seem very puzzling. After the Finance Minister has read out a long list of giveaways to farmers, small businesses, low-INCome earners and senior citizens in his speech, none of the beneficiaries seems entirely happy with their gifts. Commentators, after...

-The Indian Express To ensure traders in Madhya Pradesh are not able to manipulate markets too much, the state has taken prices prevalent in two other states as well to calculate a reference price. The Centre is yet to work out the modalities of its MSP-based deficiency payments scheme, but if Madhya Pradesh’s just-concluded Bhaavantar Bhugtaan Yojana (BBY) is anything to go by, the scheme will be a costly one. Market arrivals of...

-Livemint.com The finance minister’s clarification that the government will use the A2+FL measure to determine MSPs for crops is likely to disappoint farmer organizations Finance minister Arun Jaitley said on Friday that farmers would be provided 50% returns over and above what they spend on inputs such as seeds and fertilizers and an imputed value of family labour, clearing the confusion over which measure of cost of cultivation would be used to...

-The Hindu Neither the Budget nor the National Health Policy 2017 shows a clear health sector road map The National Health Protection Scheme announced in this year’s Budget has generated a lot of debate. The government has committed itself to “providing coverage up to ?5 lakh per family per year for secondary and tertiary care hospitalisation” for 10 crore poor families, with approximately 50 crore people as beneficiaries. As only ?2,000 crore...