Budget 2020, presented by India’s finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Feb. 1, turned out to be worse than a damp squib. It was such a disappointment that its impact on an already weak economy now facing global headwinds, may verge on the…
Though Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman laboured for well over 2 hours when delivering her budget speech, it is likely that the aspect of the speech that will receive popular attention would be the restructuring of income tax slabs and reduction…
It’s finally time to call the bluff: the Union budget has become a completely meaningless — even misleading —exercise. Those of us who take either the pronouncements or the numbers mentioned on expected revenues and projected spending in the budget…
Besides its length, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s speech presenting the Budget for 2020-21 was notable for a number reasons. It did not discuss the likely shortfall in revenue collection relative to targets during financial year 2019-20 and what that implies…
In the search for resources to make up for sluggish tax revenue growth, one source to which the Finance Minister rising to present Budget 20201 can legitimately turn is the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). But the government’s draft on…
Here’s what we do know: the Indian economy is in a deep funk, in a downward spiral of falling employment, consumption, and investment, and rapidly decelerating GDP growth. The problem, evident for several years now, has been created by a…
Given the obsession to limit the dressed up fiscal deficit figure and unable to think of better responses to the growth slowdown than tax cuts, it is more than likely that better economic management and ways to address the intensifying…
Speculation is rife on what Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s second budget will contain and do. It does not take much to speculate on what it is most unlikely to do, which is to substantially hike central government expenditures as a…
It is not the most conducive time for Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman to present her second budget. Growth is decelerating sharply, revenues are lagging behind targets, the government’s off-budget transactions that make a mockery of budget estimates are being revealed,…
The big-ticket item in the “Interim Budget 2019-20” was the announcement of a cash transfer to farmers holding less than 2 hectares, of Rs 6,000 per household to be paid in three instalments of Rs 2,000 each. Estimated to cover…
