-Livemint.com A useful way to judge the feasibility of Arun Jaitley’s targets can be to look at how such indicators have behaved in the past While announcing an increase in rural spending, finance minister Arun Jaitley also set himself a target of doubling “the income of farmers by 2022” in this year’s budget. Laudable as the ambition is, how achievable is it? First, there is the question of nominal versus real increase...
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Budget 2016: At the time of deepening distress, govt's rural push may not be adequate -Nilachala Acharya
-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...
More »Budget 2016, through a prism of the poor -Brinda Karat
-The Indian Express Gamlina’s response is just one example of how distant this government is from the lives of the poor and how tokenistic its schemes are. Gamlina Soren, an elected panchayat member in Jharkhand, sounded upset. She had been told by a local BJP functionary that gas cylinders were going to be “gifted” to poor women by the Centre but that they must have a BPL card. “But most poor Adivasi...
More »Policy shame: sick, rare and ignored -Shilpi Bhattacharya
-The Hindu If the Indian government is serious about its commitment to realise the rights of its citizens to universal and equitable health care, it cannot ignore rare diseases. The draft National Health Policy, 2015, makes no mention of them Rare diseases are a diverse set of over 7,000 different conditions that afflict an estimated 1 in 20 Indians and 350 million people worldwide. Put simply, it means that every bus on...
More »Getting our goats -Bibek Debroy
-The Indian Express We need to make goat farming organised, tie it to agriculture and animal husbandry. This is an apocryphal story, but it is bizarre enough to be true. Once every four or five years, we have a livestock census. The latest one is the 19th, for 2012. This anecdote is about the 2007 version. In a village in West Bengal, there were 31 geese — 17 male, 14 female. An...
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