-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...
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Political expediency wins over cooperative federalism -Nitin Sethi & Ishan Bakshi
-Business Standard Cess, surcharges come in handy New Delhi: Looking to leave its political imprint over spending in rural India, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government has budgeted for a massive 31 per cent hike in its share of spending on nine big-ticket centrally sponsored schemes (CSS) in 2016-17 over last year's budgetary allocation. Last year's Budget mantra of 'cooperative federalism' has been sidestepped to favour political exigencies. To fund these schemes, which...
More »The Union Budget’s political message -Smita Gupta
-The Hindu The Union Budget 2016-17 is also the BJP’s way of trying to woo what was always a Congress constituency – rural India. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley’s third budget has a clear political message: aimed at creating a “feel good” sense among farmers and the rural poor with an eye to the slew of state elections due soon, it is an attempt to change the perception that this is a pro-rich...
More »Obstacles to cooperative federalism -Pradeep S Mehta
-The Hindu Business Line The bureaucracy has been unable to take it forward, thanks to its reluctance to share information and ideas Having been a chief minister for long, Narendra Modi as Prime Minister has rightly put his weight behind cooperative and competitive federalism. In March last year, I had elaborated in this column the relationship between the two in the context of development and growth in India in an article ‘What sort...
More »Rural households have higher debt than urban counterparts: NSSO report -Jitendra
-Down to Earth The debt in rural households is higher, even though their total assets are lesser than urban households A new survey by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) shows that rural households have higher debts than their urban counterparts. At the same time, an urban household owns more than double the asset than that of a rural household. A rural household, on an average, owned assets of Rs 10...
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