The 13th Finance Commission (TFC) has recommended a return to fiscal consolidation and reform in expenditure management. It has also suggested the Centre offer states a share of revenue raised from levies such as cesses and surcharges, according to people familiar with the report. TFC, a statutory body tasked with suggesting ways in which taxes should be shared between the Centre and states and drawing up a road map towards fiscal...

The Indian economy should recover from the recession caused by the global meltdown. India’s exposure to the world economy is quite limited. It is mainly through the exports market and partly through foreign investment flows either as equity or debt capital that Financed private investment. The extent of the dependence, however, is quite low. The recession in the exports market affects only few sectors, such as textile and labour-intensive manufactures...

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Food and Civil Supplies Minister C. Divakaran has said that Rs.56 crore has been sanctioned to Kerala State Civil Supplies Corporation (Supplyco) as part of the market intervention programmes initiated by the State government to control the price line. In an official statement here, Mr. Divakaran said the amount had been sanctioned as a follow-up to the decision taken at the December 8 meeting of the Cabinet sub-committee. The amount...

The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 (RTE) remains on paper today; four months after it secured presidential assent. This, after the Human Resource Development Ministry flagged its passage by Parliament as one of its achievements in the first 100 days of the second edition of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government. Allocation And, from all indications, the RTE — the law to operationalise the Fundamental Right...

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today said the economic reforms initiated by him almost two decades ago had reduced the number of poor, though much more was still needed to be done. “There is no evidence that the new economic policies have had an adverse effect on the poor,” Singh said at the annual conference of the Indian Economic Association here today. “The percentage of population below the poverty line has certainly not...