-Business Standard Many good ideas for agricultural reform should be in the Budget Shoring up the rural economy that has been crippled because of two successive droughts is clearly a major focus of the upcoming Budget. This is impeRATive also to revive rural demand for goods and services to stimulate overall economic growth. But how Finance Minister Arun Jaitley will seek to achieve this feat is hard to predict, though what he...

-Hindustan Times Less than a day before the Railway budget is presented in the parliament, former railways minister Dinesh Trivedi’s allegations against incumbent minister Suresh Prabhu of “fudging numbers” and concealing facts about the organisation’s financial health have surfaced in a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, that also charges Prabhu of copying Trivedi’s earlier budget speech. Citing that the current OpeRATing RATio (every paisa spent against a rupee earned) had reached...

-Livemint.com Overall, we find that social sector investments have in fact increased across all states, except Bihar In February 2015, the Government of India accepted the Fourteenth Finance Commission’s (FFC) recommendation to empower states with greater expenditure discretion. The states’ share in Union taxes, therefore, increased from 32% to 42%. While the move holds the promise to reform India’s centralized, one-size-fits-all approach to financing the social sector, the process adopted by...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Saansad Adarsh Gram Yojana, a pet project of the Prime Minister, has found few takers in its second phase with only 32 of over 750 MPs identifying panchayats to adopt: 24 from the Lok Sabha and six from the Rajya Sabha. Some sent in entries after the January 31 deadline. Narendra Modi adopted Nagepur, a village in his Varanasi Lok Sabha constituency on February 17. In the...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Supreme Court today chided the Delhi government for "resting in AC chambers" while expecting the judiciary to hand it a solution to the capital's water crisis "on a platter". Bearing the brunt was Delhi water minister Kapil Mishra, whose government has sought an apex court directive to the Centre and Haryana to restore water supply from Haryana's Munak canal, which the Jat protesters have allegedly damaged. Chief Justice...