-Frontline.in The increase in the budgetary allocation for the MGNREGA is only marginal. The scheme helped lower the poverty level by 32 per cent between 2004-05 and 2011-12, but government support for it has been declining steadily. In the beginning, economists belonging to the Right and the Left were of the view that the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) was merely a populist measure. While the former believed...

-Livemint.com A growth-first approach may work in the short-term, but India needs to prioritize sustainability simultaneously The Union Budget 2016-17, seeking to “transform India”, has been hailed for its emphasis on agricultural growth and sustainability. Symbolically, the finance minister put “agriculture and farmers’ welfare” first in his nine-point agenda. The words “agriculture” and “farmer” found 20 and 32 mentions, respectively, in the budget speech, the highest in the last decade. On the...

In the age of social media, various sections of the Indian polity and civil society have reacted publicly in diverse voices, following the presentation of the Union Budget 2016-17 by Finance Minister Shri Arun Jaitley. An assessment of the Union Budget 2016-17 has been done in the following paragraphs by the Inclusive Media for Change team, based on a number of media reports, Government documents (including the Budget documents), and reports...

-The Asian Age As one listened to finance minister Arun Jaitley deliver his third Budget speech, the overwhelming impression that was sought to be created was along anticipated lines. Here was a government whose heart was bleeding for the hapless farmer toiling in the fields, the agriculturist whose livelihood has been all but destroyed by two successive monsoon failures. Here was an administration whose representatives were concerned about the “curse of...

-The Hindu   With an eye on the upcoming elections in different States, Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has declared that he is presenting a Budget that provides “additional resources for vulnerable sections, rural areas and social and physical infrastructure”. But since aggregate expenditure in nominal terms is slated to rise by just 10.8 per cent between this financial year and the next, that seems difficult to believe. Consider, for example, the...