-TheWire.in While the increased allocation and attention is welcome, it will not be enough to counter the crisis. The current pandemic has led to loss of livelihood of substantial sections of the India population. With the economy, particularly production activities in the big urban centres, having come to a standstill, a process of reverse migration to villages took place. This decline in economic activities is taking place against a background of continuously...

-Frontline.in The Budget lacks any serious effort to address the main issues of unemployment, agrarian distress and falling incomes, revealing a high level of official insensitivity. A Budget during a time of recession, increasing unemployment, agrarian distress, falling incomes, demand constraint and malnutrition would have done well to first acknowledge the mess that policies have created and then taken steps to provide employment, boost rural incomes, increase purchasing power and thereby demand. Coming...

-Press release by Alliance for Sustainable & Holistic Agriculture (ASHA) dated 1st February, 2020 New Delhi, February 1st 2020: A thorough analysis of the Budget shows that even though the Budget speech spoke much about Agriculture and Rural sector and a 16-point program, the allocations for the Rural Economy were in fact slashed in this Budget compared to previous year. The Budget allocation for Agriculture, Allied sectors and Irrigation in 2020-21...

  The Union Budget 2020-21, which was presented by the Finance Minister Smt. Nirmala Sitharaman on 1st February, 2020 has failed to impress civil society activists and farmers' rights groups (click here  and here). Through their press releases and notes, members of CSOs were demanding as well as suggesting the Union Government for hiking the budgetary allocation for schemes like Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) and Pradhan Mantri...

-The Hindu Low allocations and specific policy statements point to greater privatisation and withdrawal of the state Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman began her speech by saying that the Union Budget was “woven around three prominent themes” — aspirational India, economic development for all and building a caring society. Achieving any of these would require extraordinary efforts on the social sector front starting with allocating additional resources for health, education, nutrition, employment...