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…
The recent interim budget clearly reflects concerns that a majority of India’s people, especially in the agricultural and informal sector, have experienced hardship despite the on-going and relatively high growth in the economy. Palliatives designed to lessen these hardships include…
Everyone expected the Modi government to do something big – or at least promise something big – before the general elections. Everyone also sensed that it would be something to do with farmers, one of the economic and social concerns…
The Narendra Modi government has now carried its penchant for undermining institutions to the national budget itself. Not only has it treated what should have been an interim budget, as its tenure lasts barely two months into the new financial…
