-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...
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India bore maximum brunt of extreme weather events in 2020: Report -Jayanta Basu
-Down to Earth As many as 2,067 lives lost to floods in India through the year, the highest in the world due to climate change-induced events Floods and Cyclone Amphan in India accounted for maximum loss of lives globally due to climate change-triggered events in 2020. The cyclone, which ravaged Sunderbans in the southern fringe of West Bengal and hinterland including Kolkata in May 2020, led to “the biggest displacement” in world...
More »The country should worry about further worsening of economic inequality in the post-COVID period
The World Economic Outlook – a bi-annual publication of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) -- released in October 2020 has anticipated that the economic progress made by the countries since the 1990s to reduce poverty would be turned upside down by the COVID-19 pandemic. On top of that, economic disparity would rise too in the post-COVID world because the crisis has disproportionately impacted women, informal sector workers and people with...
More »True fiscal responsibility -Pulapre Balakrishnan
-The Hindu Slashing public expenditure amid a recession is a recipe for serious economic disaster The National Statistical Office (NSO) recently announced estimates of economic activity in the second quarter of the current financial year. As most of the first quarter coincided with the lockdown announced by the Central government, it would only have been expected that output would be depressed as production could not have taken place. And this is what...
More »Where is the staff to serve in rural areas and implement schemes?
Huge sums of money are allocated for the rural and agrarian sectors by the Union Government in its annual budget every year, and rightly so. But in the absence of an adequate number of officials in rural areas, can the various schemes and programmes of the government be implemented properly? We will find the answer if we think about this issue deeply and the answer that would emerge should bother...
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