--Press release by the National Coalition on the Education Emergency (NCEE) dated January 29, 2022 An education emergency of unprecedented proportions has severely impacted hundreds of millions of children in India. Prolonged school closures have caused learning deprivation, student dropout, increased child labour, malnutrition, and early marriages that are compromising the future of our country. It is time to open schools and massively increase funding of public education with a clear focus...

-The Hindu It is astonishing that public expenditure data on the education sector are not easily available In the current Budget session, how much money the Central and State governments will allocate to education and for what purpose should be a matter of public concern and debate. Even before the pandemic, public spending on education in most States was below that of other middle-income countries. Most major States spent in the range...

-Livemint.com/ HowIndiaLives.com Even as it presses for market reforms in agriculture, the Centre has been actively using the basket of schemes wholly funded by it to widen the social security net for farmers. Expect that to continue in the coming Budget In 2016, the BJP-led government set itself the target to double farmers’ incomes by 2022. An inter-ministerial committee set up to recommend strategies to meet this target highlighted seven sources of...

-The Hindu Business Line Agriculture is too diverse a subject for it to be compressed into a sub-section of the regular budgets of the Centre and States During the last five years, the Budget Allocation to agriculture has seen positive shifts consistent with the Centre’s role in research, marketing, exports, and agricultural education. In the light of the farm reform Bills’ repeal, is it not the right time to formulate a separate...

-IdeasforIndia.com The Centre has sought an additional Rs. 25,000 crore as funding for MNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act). Based on simple calculations using official data, Ashwini Kulkarni contends that the actual fund requirement is in fact much higher. As the pandemic continues to adversely impact rural livelihoods, the government should allocate sufficient funds to MNREGA, in order to honour the work-on-demand guarantee. For over a month, national and local...