-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...

-PTI Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, during a debate on demonetisation in the Upper House on November 17, 2016, had termed the loan issue of Vijay Mallya a "terrible legacy" that the NDA government had inherited from the previous UPA regime. The Finance ministry has told the Central Information Commission (CIC) that it does not have information about the loans given to industrialist Vijay Mallya, prompting the transparency panel to remark that the...

-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...