-The Hindu The one lever that the government could have pulled as it watched private investment decline was to step up public investment In a meeting held with the country’s corporate leaders on September 15, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman drew attention to an important aspect of the economy today. She rightly flagged concerns about sluggish corporate investment, despite the government’s business-friendly stance, including a reduction in the corporate tax. The reduction, effected...

-The Hindu The government’s fiscal health will be brought into the political discourse with the proposed change, says top Election Commission of India official  The Election Commission of India’s (EC) proposal that political parties disclose the financial ramifications of promises in their manifestos was not linked to the recent debate on freebies, but was aimed at improving the implementation of existing guidelines, a top EC official said on Wednesday. The EC had on...

Contrary to the rising economic distress on the ground since the last few years, the official press release related to the fourth Annual Report on the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) at first glance seems to give a rosy picture about the employment situation in India.  Defined as the percentage of persons unemployed among the persons in the labour force, the unemployment rate in usual status (principal activity status + subsidiary economic activity status)...

-Newslaundry.com The finance minister asked a valid question. Here’s the answer. Last Tuesday, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman asked India’s corporate honchos why they were not investing in the Indian economy. “I want to hear from India Inc,” she said, “what’s stopping you when countries and industries abroad think this is the place to be.” This is a valid question. In this piece, we will try and piece together why India Inc, as corporate India...

-The Telegraph The ambit of the corpus created to fight public health emergencies widened but its veil stays intact The veil on the PM Cares Fund — the corpus created to battle the Covid-19 crisis without the tiresome need for any audit scrutiny — remained firmly in place even as its newly-appointed trustees decided on Wednesday to widen the scope of its operations. Prime Minister Narendra Modi chaired a virtual meeting of the...