-The Indian Express Budget 2016 has a greater focus on the rural and social sectors. But the challenge will lie in improving delivery systems. Indian agriculture as well as the rural sector have been in distress in the last two years due to deficit rainfall and the decline in global commodity prices. The rural non-agriculture sector, too, has been under stress due to the lack of demand for manufacturing and services. It...

-Economic and Political Weekly The Modi government tries hard to signal a makeover but beyond the symbolic it does not change much. Budget 2016 is not important for the proposals that it has made but for what it tries to signal about the proposed makeover, in a limited way, of the Narendra Modi government. The budget does try hard to claim that the Modi government is not a “suit-boot” administration, an image...

-FirstPost.com The preliminary reactions of many people after the Budget presentation gave the impression that farm sector got a boost in terms of a significant increase in budget outlays for the sector. But a closer look reveals that behind this apparent increase is the accounting adjustment of funds for interest subvention, earlier reported under the Ministry of Finance, now shown under the Ministry of Agriculture. In 2014-15, actual spending by the Department...

-TheWire.in The message coming out of finance minister Arun Jaitley’s budget this year is that the rural economy is back at the heart of policy-making. One of the highlights of the budget was the announcement of the ‘Health Protection Scheme’, under which poor households will be provided with an annual cover of Rs. 1 lakh to protect them from health-related financial shocks. This marks a significant expansion of the Rashtriya Swasthya...

-The Hindu Business Line The Budget’s agriculture focus is welcome, but it could have done better A Budget with a purported focus on agriculture could not have come at a better time. There has been a sharp dip in agriculture output from a trend rate of growth of 4 per cent per annum in the period 2004-05 to 2011-12 to about 1.5 per cent in the next four years, which includes a...