-The Hindu In case you missed the Budget, here's a round-up. Affirming that the economy is right on track, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley presented the Union Budget for 2016-17. Citing that the CPI inflation has come down to 5.4% from 9 plus, he said it is huge relief for the public. Tax Infrastructure and agriculture cess to be levied. Excise duty raised from 10 to 15 per cent on tobacco products other than beedis 1 per...
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Budget 2016: Aadhaar project to be given statutory backing -Shreeja Sen
-Livemint.com The move to introduce a law to bring statutory backing for Aadhaar will clear decks for Jan Dhan Yojana, Aadhaar and Mobile number aimed at expanding access to financial services New Delhi: Statutory backing for the Aadhaar unique identification scheme will be introduced during the financial year 2016-17, finance minister Arun Jaitley said on Monday in his budget speech. The bill will be introduced in the current budget session. The government’s...
More »Budget 2016: PAHAL may be a success but not all DBTs are; FM should mind the gaps -Malini Chakravarty
-FirstPost.com Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) schemes, in vogue for some time in India now, have surfaced with renewed fervour over the last year and a half. DBT, as the term suggests, is a strategy aimed to electronically transfer price subsidies and benefits provided under various welfare schemes as cash directly into the bank accounts of beneficiaries. The Economic Survey 2014-15 made a strong case for replacing various price subsidies and in-kind transfers...
More »Prof. Jan Breman, Professor Emeritus at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, interviewed by G Sampath
-The Hindu Jan Breman takes a long view of the changes he’s seen in India over half a century. Perhaps no other scholar in the social sciences has studied India’s poor and its informal economy as intensively as Jan Breman. The sheer temporal span of his research is mind-boggling. He began his study in south Gujarat 15 years after India’s Independence — in 1962. And he was in south Gujarat in...
More »India’s failed diplomacy at the WTO
-Livemint.com It has repeatedly failed to protect the domestic food security agenda The cabinet’s approval of the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) on Wednesday is, on the face of it, a relatively innocuous development. As WTO deals go, this is low-hanging fruit. The agreement is to reduce administrative barriers at ports and customs, reducing transactional costs of international trade and consequently—according to various studies—increasing global gross domestic product...
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