-The Hindu In a pre-election Budget, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley serves up a mix of populism and prudence With a clear eye on the Lok Sabha election, Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley pulled out all the stops in the Narendra Modi government’s last full Budget to promise a better deal for farmers, boost the rural economy and make the poor less vulnerable to health exigencies. Responding to the distress in the agriculture sector...

-The Financial Express Over 14 crore households who cultivate on land owned by others under a formal lease agreement or even under a temporary arrangement overseen by the gram panchayats or other official functionaries may soon start getting assorted sops doled out to “farmers” by the government just as their land-owing counterparts do. According to official sources, the definition of farmer will be changed via a gazzette notification to include cultivators...

-The Times of India DAVOS: India was ranked 62nd among 74 emerging economies on World Economic Forum's Inclusive Development Index, a report released on Monday said. Although India was ranked lower than Brazil, Russia, China and even Pakistan, it was among the 10 emerging economies with 'advancing' trend. "The 2018 index measures progress of 103 economies on three individual pillars-growth & development, inclusion & inter-generational Equity and sustainability. Of the three pillars,...

-MoneyLife.in The government’s penchant for painting all legitimate questions about its faulty policy-making as scaremongering or anti-national is getting rather irksome. Prime minister Narendra Modi (at the FICCI annual general meeting) and finance minister Arun Jaitley have both responded to fears over the implications of the Financial Resolution and Deposit Insurance Bill (FRDI Bill) , 2017, by lashing out at critics and reassuring people that the government will protect bank deposits....

-Firstpost.com The Financial Resolution and Deposit Insurance (FRDI) Bill proposes to create a framework for overseeing financial institutions such as banks, insurance companies, non-banking financial services (NBFC) companies and stock exchanges in case of insolvency. The 'Resolution Corporation', proposed in the draft bill, would look after the process and prevent the banks from going bankrupt. It would do this by "writing down of the liabilities", a phrase some have interpreted as a...