-Livemint.com Much of the increased spending will go towards preventive aspects of healthcare, with the health ministry by itself not gaining much even after the pandemic. India needs to do a whole lot more to strengthen its health infrastructure In her Budget speech, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced a 137% increase in allocations on “health and well-being" for 2021-22, to ₹2.24 trillion. Embedded in that declaration was a definitional change: it also...

-The Indian Express No announcements on recovering learning loss, support for children at risk of not returning to school. The government’s proposed spending on education next year has been cut by Rs 6,000 crore at a time when the Covid-19-induced disruption is expected to have exacerbated students’ learning loss and school dropout rates. The total education budget was slashed by 6 per cent from Rs 99,311 crore in 2020-21 to Rs 93,224 crore...

-Firstpost.com The biggest hoodwink is the starved Poshan Abhiyan 2.0, which though merges the Supplementary Nutrition Programme and the Poshan Abhiyan, has been allocated an amount less than what was prescribed for Anganwadi services in 2020 In a post-truth world, the plain cold statistics in the fine print of the Union Budget 2021 often reveal more than the Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman's speech. The budget for NREGA labourers has been slashed despite...

-Livemint.com The Union government has finally stepped on the gas when it comes to spending. But after a temporary splurge in the rest of this fiscal year, the finance ministry will tighten its purse strings to bring down debt levels, the budget numbers suggest Even as countries across the world raised spending aggressively to counter the economic impact of the covid-19 pandemic, India had remained an outlier. Throughout the pandemic, the finance...

-The Hindu Farmer advocates not impressed by on-ground impact of budget announcements The Union Budget sent mixed signals to the tens of thousands of farmers who have been protesting on Delhi’s borders for the last two months, and the wider agricultural community. On the one hand, the budget allocation for the Department of Agriculture, Cooperation and Farmers Welfare was slashed 8.5% in 2021-22. The flagship PM-KISAN scheme, meant to provide income support to...