-The Hindu The belt-tightening requires the poor to pay increased indirect taxes while the cushion of the social sector is consistently taken away from them. There is always a hype around a Union Budget but this time around, the expectations were running sky-high in terms of it being the make-or-break Budget for the Narendra Modi-led government since it happens to be in the middle of his five-year term. I must say at...
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By no means a ‘socialist’ Budget -G Sampath
-The Hindu Be it education, health, pensions for the socially vulnerable, distressed farmers, or MGNREGA, the 2016 Union Budget has nothing radical to offer. Appearances can be deceptive. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley’s emphasis on doubling farm incomes, rural development, and allocations for a battery of impressively named schemes for the social sector may give the impression that the right-wing NDA government has suddenly taken a ‘socialist’ turn. The reality, however, is otherwise. Howsoever...
More »Rail Budget 2016: Kudos Suresh Prabhu, for signalling much-needed focus shift to customers, staff -Payal Dey
-FirstPost.com Preparation of budgets is traditionally an incremental process: the first railway budget of the present government took off from the landscape sketched in the 12th Five Year Plan. Expansion, modernisation and development of railway infrastructure were to be given thrust through 3Ps: Public-Private Partnerships. Budget 2016-17, however, promises a new horizon on two fronts: overcoming challenges through 3Rs: Reorganising, Restructuring and Rejuvenating Indian railways, and introducing pillars of strategy, including zero-based...
More »Dear Government, We're Choking. Want To Help? -IP Bajpai
-NDTV Why is it that every time anything has to be done about pollution in our cities or in fact large environmental issues, elected governments do very little and it needs the Supreme Court (or other courts) to intervene? Between 1998 and 2001 the Supreme Court issued orders on pollution in Delhi NINETEEN times. On Monday, they intervened again and asked why tolls cannot be imposed on trucks passing through Delhi to...
More »Farmers are being punished to keep food prices low -Devinder Sharma
-ABP Live Some days back the death of Surjit Singh, who had met Rahul Gandhi a few days before he committed suicide, once again brought the focus on the tragic but unresolved issue of farmer suicides. A few days after Surjit Singh consumed sulphos tablets, another 36-year-old farmer, Baljinder Das Bairagi from Sangrur, hanged himself from a ceiling fan. He carried an outstanding loan of Rs 7-lakh. A survey done by three...
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