-Hindustan Times Fiscal prudence has been compromised in favour of pleasing every conceivable vote bank the NDA can appeal to What a difference five years make. In July 2014, when the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) unveiled its first full budget, finance minister Arun Jaitley made clear that the NDA was against “mindless populism”. “India,” he said in a media interaction, “has to make a choice between mindless populism and fiscal prudence…. the...
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Education and Employment Drew Blanks in the Interim Budget -Kiran Bhatty
-TheWire.in The new vision wants youth to figure out education and skills on their own but still expects them to be the drivers of economic progress. Piyush Goyal, presenting the interim budget, called it a road map for peoples’ development – a fitting description for an election year budget. Accordingly, it contained the expected sops to farmers (income support), to the middle class and home owners (increase in income tax and rental...
More »Why Universal Basic Income is Fraught With Serious Problems -Prabhat Patnaik
-Newsclick.in Income support should not lead to the State washing its hands of the poor after handing them a certain sum of money whose real value too would dwindle over time. With Congress president Rahul Gandhi’s announcement recently at Raipur that his party had taken a “historic decision” to introduce an income guarantee scheme for the poor, and with the general anticipation that the Narendra Modi government’s last budget will also announce...
More »Budget 2019: Farmer payout Rs 6,000 won't cost much but won't mean much either -Harish Damodaran
-The Indian Express Under the Pradhan Mantri — Kisan Samman Nidhi scheme, all farmers cultivating up to two hectares (5 acres) will get direct income support of Rs 6,000 annually, payable in three equal instalments of Rs 2,000 each. Work out the basic arithmetic of a farm’s expense — fertiliser, machinery, fuel, seeds — and an annual Rs 6000-payout, an average of Rs 16.40 a day, doesn’t add up to much. In...
More »There is so much confusion about the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi Yojana
Against the backdrop of the Finance Minister Shri Piyush Goyal announcing the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PMKSN) programme during his budget speech on 1st February, 2019, it becomes essential to differentiate between 12.56 crore operational holding households (enumerated, as per the Agriculture Census) and 13.33 crore ownership holding households (estimated, as per the 70th round National Sample Survey report no. 571) pertaining to size upto 2 hectares. In his budget...
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