-Down to Earth Highest rice acreage in six years, more farmers in farms, a bounty monsoon and an expected bumper harvest don't enthuse farmers as their earning dips It is a piece of news that everybody would love to cheer about, except those who made this possible. The current kharif season is exceptional. In comparison to last year, over eight million more hectares of farms are under cultivation this season. There are more...
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New norms for appointing retired central govt. officials on contract basis
-PTI/ The Hindu Finance Ministry’s draft guidelines state that appointments by way of nomination based on the credentials of past service and not through open market advertisement, should not be made as a “matter of practice and must be kept at bare minimum“. The Finance Ministry is working on norms to regulate salary paid to retired central government employees re-appointed on contract and has proposed keeping nomination-based appointments at “bare minimum“. Please click...
More »Where is the staff to serve in rural areas and implement schemes?
Huge sums of money are allocated for the rural and agrarian sectors by the Union Government in its annual budget every year, and rightly so. But in the absence of an adequate number of officials in rural areas, can the various schemes and programmes of the government be implemented properly? We will find the answer if we think about this issue deeply and the answer that would emerge should bother...
More »GST cess falls 42% short in FY20
-The Hindu Compensation for last fiscal paid to States using previous years’ balance of cess The Centre made up a 42% shortfall in Goods and Services Tax compensation cess collection in 2019-20 by using balance of cess from previous years, plus a transfer from the Consolidated Fund of India. Meanwhile, the GST Council, which was slated to meet this month to discuss the possibility of market borrowing to meet likely future shortfalls,...
More »Can raising the approved labour budget from 280.76 crore person-days to 306.6 crore person-days help the unskilled returnee migrants who prefer MGNREGA to Garib Kalyan Rojgar Abhiyaan?
Although social activists and concerned economists demanded at least Rs. 1 lakh crore to be earmarked in favour of the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), the Finance Minister in her budget speech on 1st February allocated only Rs.61,500 crore to it for the financial year 2020-21. As compared to the fund spent on MGNREGA in 2019-20 (i.e. revised estimate of Rs.71,001.81 crore), the amount set aside for the...
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