-The Times of India Blog The presidential address to Parliament on June 9, 2014 had focussed nearly exclusively on projects and schemes, eschewing policy. Therefore, many had eagerly awaited the budget speech for a policy vision of the new government. Unfortunately, it too left observers guessing on whether the government would tackle tough reforms or rely principally on better implementation. Had this been the budget of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), arguably...

-The Hindu It was late afternoon on December 21, 2012, five days after five men and a juvenile gang-raped and fatally assaulted a 23-year-old paramedic student in a moving bus in Delhi. The stream of people walking towards Raisina Hill kept growing. Every few minutes, a loud sound followed by smoke billowing from tear gas shells fired from the towering red sandstone government buildings would send the protesters running. In a...

-The Indian Express Human Development Report: Spending 4% of GDP can ensure social security net. India may have little to feel proud about in the findings of UNDP's Human Development Report for 2014, but the good news is that with ongoing rural employment and school education programmes and some serious discussions on universal healthcare over the last couple of years, it is moving in the right direction. The report gives a six-point...

-Vikalp A remarkable feature of the first budget of the Modi government was that the numbers in it (see Table 1 for a summary) - of the revenues that are anticipated from different source, the expenditures allocated to different heads and the fiscal deficit which expresses the gap between the aggregates of these - were almost identical to those in the interim budget presented earlier in the year by the UPA...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Four days before Prime Minister Narendra Modi made his first public statement surprisingly backing the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), former UIDAI chairman Nandan Nilekani met with the PM and Finance minister Arun Jaitley and persuaded the new regime to persist with Aadhaar numbers and the Direct Benefits Transfer (DBT) scheme. This meeting - a life-saver for the Aadhaar programme - happened on the first...