-The Hindu Business Line To be finalised by the end of this month New Delhi: The NITI-Aayog has initiated discussions on putting in place a system to fix minimum support price (MSP) for different crops. A consultation meeting to discuss various options was held on Friday chaired by the NITI-Aayog Vice-Chairman Rajiv Kumar. The move comes following an announcement in the Budget by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley that the Aayog will work with States...
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The changing politics of food price inflation -Sonal Varma and Aurodeep Nandi
-Livemint.com Linking MSPs to a multiple of costs and ignoring other dynamics, such as demand and global prices, risks creating distortions and disincentivizing productivity Government policymaking seems to be making a volte-face from supporting consumers (by keeping food inflation low), to supporting producers (by raising food prices). In the 2018-19 Union budget, the government “decided to keep minimum support prices (MSP) for all unannounced crops of kharif at least at one-and-a-half times of...
More »Too clever by half? -Venkatesh Athreya
-Frontline.in Despite its deeply flawed neoliberal perspective, Economic Survey 2017-18 is rich in detail, has many useful analytical discussions at different levels of aggregation, and would serve as a useful resource for students and scholars. When Arvind Subramanian, the present Chief Economic Adviser to the Ministry of Finance who took office way back in October 2014, presented his first Economic Survey, the one for 2014-15, there was considerable novelty on offer, at...
More »Budget 2018: Will Women Really Be Better Off at the End of This Fiscal? -Barkha Deva
-TheWire.in In the gender Budget, the Modi government has not done much more than pay lip service to policies that impact women. Soon after the Union Budget was presented, the PMO tweeted Modi as saying: “Special emphasis has been given on women empowerment in the Budget.” A high-voltage communication campaign followed highlighting key proposals for women, including an increase in commitments for the Ujjwala scheme to provide free gas connections to eight crore...
More »Hardly a gamechanger -Subrata Mukherjee & Subhanil Chowdhury
-The Hindu Neither the Budget nor the National Health Policy 2017 shows a clear health sector road map The National Health Protection Scheme announced in this year’s Budget has generated a lot of debate. The government has committed itself to “providing coverage up to ?5 lakh per family per year for secondary and tertiary care hospitalisation” for 10 crore poor families, with approximately 50 crore people as beneficiaries. As only ?2,000 crore...
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