In the age of social media, various sections of the Indian polity and civil society have reacted publicly in diverse voices, following the presentation of the Union Budget 2016-17 by Finance Minister Shri Arun Jaitley. An assessment of the Union Budget 2016-17 has been done in the following paragraphs by the Inclusive Media for Change team, based on a number of media reports, Government documents (including the Budget documents), and reports...

-Hindustan Times Chandigarh: The Union budgetary proposal of converting 5 lakh hectares in the country under organic farming means little to the agrarian state of Punjab that is engulfed in a long-standing debate—the country’s food security vs organic farming. Punjab State Farmers’ Commission and Punjab Agricultural University (PAU) are sceptical about the state going the organic way on a large scale, explaining agro-economic realities, notwithstanding the state government’s cosmetic exercises and verbal...

-The Telegraph Arun Jaitley today drew loud cheers from the fiscal conservatives as he displayed "prudence" and stuck to the fiscal deficit - which captures the government's borrowing requirements - target of 3.9 per cent of the GDP for 2015-16 and pegged it at 3.5 per cent of the GDP for 2016-17. As the achievement came despite all the problems that the Indian economy faced - the Economic Survey presented details of...

-TheHansIndia.com The ongoing drought is fuelling distress migration from districts in Telangana, a trend that was witnessed in the early 2000s. The severe drought conditions for the second consecutive year have led to crop failure, mounting debts, chronic unemployment and failure of the NREGA scheme, especially in the districts of Mahbubnagar, Medak, and Adilabad, forcing large-scale exodus of farmers and others.   The fruits of a people’s movement and the world’s largest anti-poverty...

-Hindustan Times Ranchi: Better known as Jharkhand’s waterman, Simon Oraon had always been more popular among farmers in the district’s Bedo block than the country’s newspaper-reading public. But all that changed on Monday, when the President’s office announced that he would be given the coveted Padma Shri award for his contribution to environment conservation. Oraon, 83, has been waging a war against drought since the day he dropped out of school as...