-The Indian Express While the government has failed to deliver what was promised through the main budget and subsequent mini-budgets, estimates for next year also point to missed opportunities to use fiscal measures to revive the ailing economy. Expectations from Budget 2021 were high. Unsurprisingly so, for an economy battered by two years of slowdown, with a pre-pandemic annual growth rate of 4 per cent being a decadal low and the subsequent...

-Counterview.net Even as calling Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s budget “historic”, top international NGO Oxfam, pointing towards “some gaps” in it, “especially while addressing inequalities on the lines of caste, class, gender and occupation”, has regretted that the budget “does not address the urgent spending needs in the social sector, especially in health and education.” In a statement, Oxfam India quotes CEO stating that “the Union Budget 2021 has failed to address inequality...

-Hindustan Times Here are three charts which can help us understand this. If there is one point on which the Union Budget 2021-22 has received bipartisan praise, it is the fiscal transparency it has brought into budgetary calculations. By bringing hitherto uncounted expenditure heads into the budgetary numbers, and accounting for past dues, the budget has done away with the dubious practice of artificially underreporting the fiscal deficit numbers. While this is a...

-The Hindu That there is no targeted employment programme to alleviate the immediate crisis is a matter of concern The Budget, at its simplest, is the government’s tentative income and expenditure statement. Like all financial statements, the devil lies in the fine print. At its broadest, the Budget is a pious statement of the government’s policy and ideological intentions. It is also the government’s statement of how it seeks to tackle the...

-The Indian Express No announcements on recovering learning loss, support for children at risk of not returning to school. The government’s proposed spending on education next year has been cut by Rs 6,000 crore at a time when the Covid-19-induced disruption is expected to have exacerbated students’ learning loss and school dropout rates. The total education budget was slashed by 6 per cent from Rs 99,311 crore in 2020-21 to Rs 93,224 crore...