-Hindustan Times The chairman of the 15th Finance Commission, NK Singh, spoke to Zia Haq about the final report of the Commission for 2021-26 which has now been made public. Edited excerpts. The Constitution, through Article 280 to 281, provides for finance commissions every five years as a mechanism for sharing of taxes and revenues vertically between the Centre and states; and horizontally among all states, based on levels of development, demographic...

-Hindustan Times The data, culled from the education department of Delhi, and civic bodies that run the municipal schools, shows that these children have simply fallen off the map -- the schools say they can’t trace them. Over 166,000 students in Delhi’s government and municipal schools are missing, the impact of education moving online as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. The number is roughly 8.5% of the students enrolled in the...

-Hindustan Times Here are three charts which can help us understand this. If there is one point on which the Union Budget 2021-22 has received bipartisan praise, it is the fiscal transparency it has brought into budgetary calculations. By bringing hitherto uncounted expenditure heads into the budgetary numbers, and accounting for past dues, the budget has done away with the dubious practice of artificially underreporting the fiscal deficit numbers. While this is a...

-Hindustan Times Several announcements — a bad bank, the proposal for a development financial institution, and bank recapitalisation — aim at reforming the economy. But these will not respond to the structural inequalities caused by the pandemic Covid-19 is a crisis like no other. And, expectedly, it has wreaked havoc on the Government of India (GoI)’s financial arithmetic as it struggled to deal with collapsing tax revenues and increased expenditure pressures. Therefore,...

-Hindustan Times/ Livemint.com “There is an immediate need to improve agricultural infrastructure so that we produce more, while also conserving and processing agricultural output efficiently,” Nirmala Sitharaman said in her budget speech. The government on Monday introduced a new agriculture infrastructure development cess (AIDC) on petrol, diesel and several other imported items. Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman assured it won’t place any additional burden on consumers. However, following the introduction of the cess, states...