-The Telegraph Sitharaman spun a narrative, listed some intent but did little to give the economy a much-needed push The nation had swooned over Narendra Modi’s Mazboot Bharat narrative in April-May, giving the BJP a thumping victory in the Lok Sabha polls. The success of the saffron camp in spinning narratives was in full display on Friday when Nirmala Sitharaman rose to present the Union budget 2019-20 that the ruling dispensation in...
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Budget 2019 Sorely Lacks a Coherent Vision for Long-Term Growth -MK Venu
-TheWire.in While Nirmala Sitharaman's maiden budget hit all the right political notes, its fiscal math is far fuzzier. The first budget of the Narendra Modi government 2.0 is very high on political rhetoric around empowering the poorest in ‘New India’, but does not have a clear road map of how a fully-funded welfare state will be sustained without a robust revival in growth, based on the twin engines of investment and consumption...
More »Why the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi scheme will be hard to implement -Priscilla Jebaraj
-The Hindu * What does the scheme offer? The Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi scheme, announced in the Budget earlier this month, aims to give ?6,000 a year to 12 crore farmer families who own up to two hectares of cultivable land. * What are the challenges? The number of beneficiaries comes from the number of land holdings of two hectares or less, according to the last agricultural land census. However, the guidelines say...
More »The mistaken obsession with the fiscal deficit -CP Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh
-Networkideas.org It’s that time of year again – the time when all eyes turn to those magic numbers, the actual and proposed fiscal deficits of the central government as shares of GDP. Breathless news anchors will interrogate financial investors on what the numbers mean, and why 3.5 per cent or 3.7 per cent is fatally worse than, say, 3.4 per cent or 3.2 per cent or less. Everyone will breathe a...
More »Finance ministry has a poor forecasting record -Sharmadha Srinivasan, Prakhar Misra and Niranjan Rajadhyaksha
-Livemint.com Given the over-optimistic revenue estimates and under-budgeted expenditure, the FinMin’s budget projections should be taken with a pinch of salt Dark clouds are gathering over the fiscal horizon. Finance minister Arun Jaitley will table an interim budget on 1 February—just weeks before India goes to polls. There’s a growing consensus among analysts that the government will miss its revenue target for the year, largely because the collections from the goods and services...
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