-The Hindu That there is no targeted employment programme to alleviate the immediate crisis is a matter of concern The Budget, at its simplest, is the government’s tentative income and expenditure statement. Like all financial statements, the devil lies in the fine print. At its broadest, the Budget is a pious statement of the government’s policy and ideological intentions. It is also the government’s statement of how it seeks to tackle the...

-TheWire.in ASHA workers and other community healthcare workers have experienced extra working hours, loss of pay and social apathy during the pandemic. Walking into 2021, if there was one positive to be identified with the large-scale outbreak of a pandemic in 2020 in India, and the rest of the developing world, it would have been this: a primary focus given by most governments and their executive agencies to improve healthcare services and...

-Hindustan Times Despite enhanced commitments across spheres, the government has spent less this year than it did last year Typically, when a crisis hits, the expectation is that the Centre — which has more revenue-raising abilities than states — will take the lead in preparing a fiscal road map, loosen its purse strings and raise expenditure significantly. The Covid-19 pandemic is unprecedented in its scale and impact. But this is also when...

-The Hindu Slashing public expenditure amid a recession is a recipe for serious economic disaster The National Statistical Office (NSO) recently announced estimates of economic activity in the second quarter of the current financial year. As most of the first quarter coincided with the lockdown announced by the Central government, it would only have been expected that output would be depressed as production could not have taken place. And this is what...

Just before Dhanteras and Diwali this year, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) released the November edition of its monthly bulletin. The latest RBI Monthly Bulletin says that the GDP has contracted by -8.6 percent in the second quarter of fiscal year 2020-21 (i.e. July-September, 2020) as compared to the gross domestic product (GDP) during the corresponding period last year. It may be noted that India’s GDP shrunk by -23.9...