With the short-term, frenzied interest that accompanies annual budget presentations in India having ended, it is time to raise issues that were largely ignored in the debate. Prime among them is the question as to how much or how little…
No budget in post-independence India had been as openly cynical about the lives of the vast masses of the working people as the one presented on February 1, 2025. All pundits, from the finance minister downwards, agree that the strategy…
If an element of surprise is a hallmark of a good budget, then Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman can pride herself on having won the day on February 1. In a briefer than usual Budget speech, reflecting impatience to get to…
Implicit in the Budget is the hope that tax concessions will result in spending and also reviving GDP growth, and ‘incentivising’ the corporate sector will revive private investment The background to Budget 2025-26, as presented even by the official Economic…
With the short-term, frenzied interest that accompanies annual budget presentations in India having ended, it is time to raise issues that were largely ignored in the debate. Prime among them is the question as to how much or how little…
There is massive unemployment in the country that especially afflicts the youth; there is a huge and persistent inflation in food prices; there is acute and unprecedented rural distress; there is a crisis in the petty production sector; and income…
The mismatch between the problem at hand and what the Budget offers is stark be it welfare or even taking care of key political allies Just before Nirmala Sitharaman presented her seventh consecutive Budget as Union Finance Minister of a…
If we ignore the hype that accompanies and follows the presentation of the Centre’s annual budget, there are principally two strands in it that have attracted attention. The first is the claim of the finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman that in…
The most outstanding feature of the Indian economy today is the sluggish increase in real consumption expenditure. Between 2019-20 and 2022-23 for instance the per capita real consumption expenditure has grown by less than 5 per cent which is less…
We all know that the Narendra Modi government has strong centralising tendencies — not just between the Centre and the state governments but even within Central ministries, with the Prime Minister’s Office and the ministry of home affairs being the…
