-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...

-The Indian Express The budget should have shown how serious it was about inclusive growth by announcing direct cash support to informal workers, circular migrants, agricultural labour, in addition to steady in-kind food transfers from the overflowing coffers of the FCI by making PDS universal. India’s annual budget, announced amidst much anticipation, focused on health as one of its key pillars. The fact that health and “inclusive growth” found their way into...

-TheWire.in Ideally, the government should increase the work entitlement for MGNREGA to at least 150 days, double the budget and put in place an urban employment guarantee act. Let’s start with those who did well over the last 10 months. The Sensex index crossed the 50,000 benchmark for the first time on January 21, 2021, with a whopping 70% increase since April 2020. The Oxfam inequality report, just released, gives an idea of...

The World Economic Outlook – a bi-annual publication of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) -- released in October 2020 has anticipated that the economic progress made by the countries since the 1990s to reduce poverty would be turned upside down by the COVID-19 pandemic. On top of that, economic disparity would rise too in the post-COVID world because the crisis has disproportionately impacted women, informal sector workers and people with...

-TheWire.in The programme has been able to make a positive impact in the lives of around 3,000 tribal women by equipping them with skills in sewing, soft-toy making, clay art, embroidery, among others. Jaipur: When Deepa had to move to Kushalgarh, a small sub-divisional township in the southern part of Rajasthan, with her husband, she had little idea that it would alter her life substantially. Deepa’s husband, Narendra Biswas, who worked as a...