-Hindustan Times Farmers have experienced a growing mismatch between their production efforts and incomes under the Narendra Modi government. The coming union budget will have to find a balance between two contradictory FDs: farm-distress and fiscal discipline. The choice is not going to be an easy one. Ignoring farm-distress in the last full-fledged budget before elections could be politically suicidal. Meanwhile, there are at least two things that could make the government slip...

-Business Today Social sector spending and investments in infrastructure development could be the highlights of the forthcoming Union Budget 2018-19, credit rating agency ICRA forecasts. It expects increase in budgetary allocations for social infrastructure and social security spending, such as NREGA (rural job security), food subsidy (food security), insurance schemes and welfare pensions. Larger allocations for infrastructure related to cold chains, etc., considered to boost the agricultural sector and the rural...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Sangh parivar affiliates Swadeshi Jagran Manch and Bharatiya Kisan Sangh have urged the government to address joblessness and agrarian distress in the budget, sounding an alert before the 2019 general election campaign. The Manch, the Sangh's economic wing, has suggested the government shift focus and provide incentives to indigenous small-scale industries to generate more jobs. Farmer arm Bharatiya Kisan Sangh has advocated measures to make agricultural remunerative and demanded...

-The Indian Express India’s economy is not doing well. Only carefully crafted policy reforms can turn it around The Indian government recently lowered its economic growth forecast for 2017-18 to 6.5 per cent, and there is reason to be concerned. That the economy would suffer a slowdown after demonetisation was inevitable, as all professional economists could see. But growth dropping to 5.7 per cent and 6.3 per cent in, respectively, the first...

  Budgetary allocation to a particular sector indicates how much priority the government assigns to that sector as compared to the rest. A preliminary analysis by the Inclusive Media for Change team indicates that the actual expenditure (net of receipts and recoveries) by two of the country’s most important ministries, namely the Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare (MoAFW) and the Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD) was less than 1 percent...