-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,...
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The Enormous Extra Spend In Budget Is An Illusion -Aunindyo Chakravarty
-NDTV blog Nirmala Sitharaman said: "We have spent, we have spent and we have spent." She had every reason to claim that, since the budget numbers show that the centre spent ₹ 4.1 lakh crore, or 13 percent above what it had planned for last year. Additional spending will continue this year: expenditure is estimated to go up by 14.5 percent in 2021-2022 compared to last year, even though the government's...
More »Before Budget: Revenues Crash, Debt Mounts – But People Still Deprived -Subodh Varma
-Newsclick.in The Modi government has created a huge mess of its finances in the past year cutting spending and borrowing heavily. When the Union Budget is presented tomorrow (February 1), the government will have its hands full and pockets empty. In the current financial year, which will end on March 31, currently available information shows that revenues (government income) are going to be much short of what was estimated in last year’s...
More »Revise the text of the Budget speech -Jayati Ghosh
-The Hindu The Finance Minister must move to an expansionary fiscal stance that prioritises job creation, public service provision It is that time of year in India, when all eyes and ears turn to the Finance Minister to learn what she will unveil in the annual Union Budget. But it is a moot point whether, even in a year of the novel coronavirus pandemic and economic crisis, that speech will be of...
More »Once in a Century Budget: Statement of Fact or Hope? -Arun Kumar
-TheWire.in The pandemic and lockdown threw existing budgetary calculus completely out of line. But that provides an opportunity too. In December 2020, talking at a CII meet, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman reportedly stated: “100 years of India wouldn’t have seen a budget being made post-pandemic like this”. Was it a mere statement of fact, that never before had parts of the budget-making process been done in a virtual manner after a pandemic, or...
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