-The Hindu Most of the earnings of the average farm household were spent in meeting consumption expenditures. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley announced a slew of measures in the Union Budget 2017 to boost the agriculture sector. Higher agricultural credit, higher allocation for irrigation projects, a crop insurance scheme and increased allocations for MGNREGA to dig farm ponds were among the measures announced on February 1. But will these help attain the goal...
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Modi Government's Budgetary Allocation for MNREGA Is Barely an Increase
-TheWire.in Two supplementary MNREGA allocations were made by the government last year. This means, there’s only a 1%, not 25%, actual increase in this year’s Budget. New Delhi: The finance minister claimed that this year’s Budget allocations for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA) were a new “record”, at Rs 48,000 crore. But is this really a substantial increase? And, more importantly, is it enough? The 2016-17 Budget had...
More »0.5% tragedy and DeMo confession
-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Demonetisation Demon will gouge India's economic growth in 2016-17 by at least half a percentage point, chief economic adviser Arvind Subramanian told reporters after presenting the Economic Survey a day before the budget. Subramanian, who was voicing his views for the first time on the deeply polarising subject of demonetisation, rejected the dire prophecies of other Oracles, including his former employer, the International Monetary Fund, that projected...
More »Battleground Punjab: The story of the missing farmers -Subodh Varma
-The Economic Times A small village called Khanauri in Punjab's Sangrur district has become a macabre hotspot. People come here to peer down at the Bhakra Main Line canal hoping to catch sight of dead bodies that get held up on the sluice gates. They are not ghouls they are looking for kin or friends who have disappeared. The canal runs unhindered like an arrow for 159 km through Punjab's eastern...
More »Case for targeted basic income -Puja Mehra
-The Hindu The idea of a basic income is not new. The first known suggestion on an unconditional universal basic income for all adults regardless of other income sources was from Thomas More. Centuries later, in 1918, Bertrand Russell discussed a basic income sufficient for necessities as central to the social model combining the advantages of anarchism and socialism that he argued for in Proposed Roads to Freedom. “A certain small...
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