-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...

-Firstpost.com The biggest hoodwink is the starved Poshan Abhiyan 2.0, which though merges the Supplementary Nutrition Programme and the Poshan Abhiyan, has Been allocated an amount less than what was prescribed for Anganwadi services in 2020 In a post-truth world, the plain cold statistics in the fine print of the Union Budget 2021 often reveal more than the Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman's speech. The budget for NREGA labourers has Been slashed despite...

-The Indian Express While Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman did not mention PM-Kisan in her Budget speech, she tried to assure farmers about the minimum support price (MSP). The Agriculture Ministry did not spend its full budget during 2020-21, leading to a reduction in the allocation in the revised estimates (RE) for the current financial year and a lower outlay for the next one. In Union Budget 2021-22, the two departments—Department of Agriculture,...

-Down to Earth blog The distress among small farmers in India is market-driven to a large extent in both ways — too much protection (minimum support price) or too little. The question of future of Indian agriculture has Been around for some time now since the agrarian distress and crisis in the sector. It has become important in the context of the spate of recent reforms that include permitting private wholesale markets,...

-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...