-The Indian Express The income transfer scheme was the highlight of the budget. But its success will need deft manoeuvring. Like in each of the previous two years, the run-up to the budget this year was rife with fears of significant fiscal slippage if the government caved in to political compulsions. And like in prior years, these fears turned out to be exaggerated. The decline in fiscal deficit ratios has indeed...
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With an ocean of salt -Rajeev Gowda
-The Indian Express Interim budget does little to tackle unemployment, poverty. And it is clear that the government’s figures cannot be trusted. Last month, I was pART of an all-pARTy delegation of MPs from Karnataka, led by a Union cabinet minister, who met the Union rural development minister. We requested him to release the MGNREGA funds overdue to Karnataka. We pleaded that the poorest of the poor, who turn to MGNREGA...
More »No unemployment data post-demonetisation: Labour Minister
-The Hindu Labour Minister replies to Parliament New Delhi: There is no data available on unemployment subsequent to the period of demonetisation, Labour Minister Santosh Gangwar told Parliament on Monday, in a written response to a question in the Lok Sabha. More than a third of the questions asked by Members of Parliament to the Labour Ministry on Monday were related to unemployment data. The Ministry held firmly to citing Labour Bureau surveys...
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 »A national register of exclusion -Harsh Mander
-The Hindu There are few parallels anywhere else of the state itself producing statelessness in the manner that it is doing in Assam By requiring long-term residents of Assam to prove their citizenship by negotiating a thicket made up of bewildering and opaque rules and an uncaring bureaucracy, the Indian state has for the past two decades unleashed an unrelenting nightmare of wanton injustice on a massive swathe of its most vulnerable...
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