-The Times of India HYDERABAD: The tall claims of the successive governments notwithstanding, Devadasi system continues to flourish in rural areas of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. According to a report submitted by one-man commission recently, the two states together have about 80,000 Devadasi women. This was much over the estimated number of the AP social welfare commission, which put the figure at 24,273. A one-man commission headed by Justice Raghunath Rao, a...

-FirstPost.com Abhijit Sen, part-time member of the Planning commission, has openly criticised some of the recommendations of the 14th Finance Commission, particularly with respect to the ones on sharing of taxes to State Governments. The dissent note was carried in the report of the commission tabled in Parliament on Tuesday. "The recommendations regarding devolution and revenue deficit grants are bound to disrupt existing plan transfers, with likely very serious effects in the...

-The Hindu The implementation of the National Food Security Act is mired in apathy and confusion. A grave injustice is being done to millions of people who live on the margin of subsistence. It is not too late to remove the roadblocks, but this requires a sense of urgency An odd silence has surrounded the National Food Security Act (NFSA) in the last few months - as if food insecurity were a...

Quite opposite to the top-down model of budgeting, the newly elected Aam Aadmi Party-led Government in Delhi has decided to go for a 'citizen-centric' budget planning at 'mohalla'-level for the fiscal year 2015-16. Drawing lessons from the success stories of participatory budgeting conducted at municipal-level in cities like Porto Alegre (Brazil), the AAP-led Delhi Government has decided to launch this form of decentralized budgeting on a pilot basis in a...

-Livemint.com India's fiscal architecture is undergoing a radical overhaul this budget season. On Tuesday, the NDA government accepted the Finance Commission's proposal to enhance tax devolution to states. This, coupled with efforts to rationalize and reduce centrally sponsored schemes (CSS) through the chief ministers sub-group of the NITI Aayog, and the repeated calls for cooperative federalism together suggest that decentralization to states is the new mantra. Missing from this rhetoric of decentralization...