-ThePrint.in The larger lesson is clear: in an era when the Congress & the BJP can agree on next to nothing, they will gladly join hands to save their own skin. Among all the talk of the aam aadmi focus emerging from last week’s Budget, many people may have missed one of its most self-serving acts. This manoeuvre found no mention in the Union Finance Minister’s presentation itself, but was instead buried...

-The Hindu Policy should address credit, crop insurance, drip irrigation The government’s efforts to focus on the welfare of farmers in the Union Budget is admirable. However, in a zero-sum situation such as Budget allocation, the government often finds itself trying to choose between short-term results and long-term benefits. Short term results might come with loan waivers and increase of Minimum Support Price (MSP), but care should be taken to address the...

-The Indian Express Budget’s bias toward privately-delivered care undermines universal health coverage Until about four decades ago, specialist healthcare (secondary and tertiary care) was largely a province of public hospitals, and the private sector largely kept itself to the provision of generalist healthcare. This underwent a transformation with the rise of the advanced medical interventions comprising tertiary-care medicine like organ transplantation and open heart surgery. Given these highly-profitable medical advances, the private...

-TheWire.in Arun Jaitley’s Budget speech was vague on the details, and closer inspection reveals that it was also misleading. Arun Jaitley, presenting his fourth Budget as finance minister, announced that he is fulfilling a promise made by his party in the election manifesto for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections – the promise of a minimum support price (MSP) that is 50% higher than farmers’ cost of production. “Government has decided to keep...

Believe it or not, the total revenue foregone in 2017-18 on account of special tax rates, exemptions, deductions, rebates, deferrals and credits -- broadly termed as 'tax expenditures' (an indirect subsidy) – that was given to corporate taxpayers has been more than 50 percent of the expenditure incurred by the Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare (MoAFW) and the Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD) altogether in that year. In other...