-TheWire.in There remains a wide chasm between the financial resources committed in budgets and the actual expenditure aimed at providing social security benefits for workers. The unprecedented crisis that the unplanned lockdown pushed workers into has once again forced social activists and researchers to contemplate over whether a legislation passed in 2008 by parliament could have provided relief to workers. Careful scrutiny of the financial resources as committed in budgets and the actual...

-Newsclick.in Directly or indirectly, the government seems uninterested in creating jobs. At a time of widespread and intense concern about the worst unemployment situation in 45 years and all the distress and discontent that accompanies it, one would have expected the Union government to put job-creation at the top of its priority-list. One of the most obvious and direct ways to do this would be to expand its own schemes and programmes...

-Newsclick.in As the numbers show, the government isn’t putting its money where its mouth is Everyone, including the government, recognises the special health and nutrition needs of adolescent girls. The only trouble is, the Union government forgets this at the time of actually providing funds for nutrition. Why else would the government cut the funds for the specific schemes for nutrition to only a half of the original allocation? In the budget for...

-Livemint.com With no significant spending increase to boost consumption or other major reform, the 2020 budget may lack the firepower to reignite the economy A growth slump, a precarious fiscal position and rising inflation: these are extraordinary times for the Indian economy. Yet in the 2020 Budget, these extraordinary times did not lead to the extraordinary measures so many economists were clamouring for. Like previous budgets under this government, the latest one...

-Down to Earth Nirmala Sitharaman's Budget has all the ingredients to deepen India’s farm crisis These are desperate times for India. Rural unemployment was at a 45-year-high while consumption expenditure of rural families fell 9 per cent between 2011-12 and 2017-18, according to a report by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO), which the government never released but got leaked to the media in November 2019. Between 2011-12 and 2015-16, the income of farmers...