-The Telegraph There are concerns that the proposal in the Economic Survey would end up privatizing a public good The Economic Survey has proposed that data of citizens obtained by the government be monetized for social benefits. It has claimed that data are a public commodity and, hence, people should benefit from large data sets. It has been proposed that data should be sold by the government to private entities like corporations...

-TheWire.in/ PRS blog The Union Budget replicates revised estimates reported in the interim Budget, not the updated figures for 2018-19 from the Controller General of Accounts. Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented the Union Budget for the financial year 2019-20 in parliament on July 5, 2019. In the 2019-20 budget, the government presented the estimates of its expenditure and receipts for the year 2019-20. The Budget also gave an account of how much...

-TheWire.in/ Macroscan.org The huge, unexplained discrepancy between the budget amounts and the 'provisional actual' figures for Central expenditure and revenue open the entire budget exercise to serious question, argues Jayati Ghosh. Please click here to read more. ...

-Press release by NREGA Sangharsh Morcha and Peoples' Action for Employment Guarantee (PAEG) dated 9 July, 2019 Even as many parts of the county suffer from drought, the new government at the centre has allocated a mere Rs 60,000 crores for the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) for the ongoing financial year. This is Rs 1,084 crore less than the revised budget estimate for 2018-19. Expenditure would have been much...

-The Indian Express The budget needed to break new ground, provide a thrust to a slowing economy. This budget lacks innovation. Economics has never been a strong point of the NDA government. Its only two major economic forays, demonetisation and the GST, have both turned out to be pretty disastrous. It was futile, therefore, to expect much from the Union Budget for 2019-20. Even so, one is surprised by the budget’s...