-The Hindu Business Line The Centre should pay attention to fertiliser subsidy which is overshooting estimates by unacceptably large margins The economic crisis in India’s South Asian neighbours has turned the spotlight on fiscal profligacy leading economies on the path to ruin. While this has sparked debate on our States doling out freebies and subsidies, the fact is that the Centre too has some soul-searching to do on this front. Even as...

Door-to-door and village-to-village surveys carried out by researchers of the Department of Economics and Sociology, Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana detected a total of 9,291 suicides that were committed by farmers in six districts of Punjab during the period from 2000 to 2018. Situated in the Malwa region of Punjab, which is known for cotton farming and the prevalence of cancer among its population, Sangrur (2,506) witnessed the highest number of...

-The Hindu The price surge in LPG cylinders has pushed consumers to lower the number of LPG refills with 5% of the PMUY beneficiaries refilling just once per year in FY22 The price of a 14.2 kg cylinder has skyrocketed to ₹1,053 in July 2022. Though a subsidy of ₹200 per cylinder was recently announced for the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana beneficiaries, the subsidised rate of ₹853 is still double the amount...

-IndiaSpend.com The United Nations projects that India's total population will surpass China's much sooner than expected, but even so, data show that India's population is actually declining, says Poonam Muttreja of the Population Foundation of India Mumbai: "What could women do if they wanted fewer children? They were opting for, amongst other things, abortion," says Poonam Muttreja, executive director of the Population Foundation of India. "Abortion rates as a proxy for contraception...

-Factly.in The RBI recently published an article State finances and the Risk Analysis. The article aims to look at the fiscal vulnerability of Indian States & emphasises on ten heavily debt-burdened states in India based on the debt-GSDP ratio in 2020-21. These ten states also account for around half of the total expenditure by all state governments in India. Here is a review. Effective and efficient public finance management is said to...