The Foreign Assets of Small Taxpayers – Disclosure Scheme, 2026 (FAST-DS 2026) was introduced by the Ministry of Finance under Sections 135 to 142 of Chapter IV of the Finance Act, 2026, to provide a voluntary, one-time compliance opportunity for Indian resident taxpayers to regularize undeclared foreign holdings and overseas-sourced income (Finance Act, 2026).
Policy UpdateDivya Natarajan Background The City Finance Rankings is a Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) initiative that evaluates, recognises, and rewards India’s Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) on the quality of their financial health and their improvement in financial…
The idea of asset recycling was created globally to help solve the traditional issue for governments known as "the sovereign dilemma" or how to provide new and better public services while keeping their public debt from increasing. The first state (in this case, Australia's New South Wales) to implement asset recycling in its post-recession economic recovery in the 2010s demonstrated that with a few key steps a government can create the cash flow needed to develop new public assets. The concept is simple: build a public asset, de-risk that public asset until it produces steady cash flowing into your budget, then lease those cash-flowing rights to private investors. Thereby immediately creating an influx of funds to start developing the next generation of public assets.
For decades, the power distribution segment has been a weak financial link in the growing electricity system in India, leading to frequent losses that state governments are forced to dig into their accounts to meet through bailouts, debt takeovers, and subsidy support.
Punjab, with a geographical area of 50,362 sq km and a population of 2.77 crore as per Census 2011, is the sixteenth most populous state in India and one of its smallest by area, contributing about 1.5 percent of the national land mass while supporting roughly 2.3 percent of its population. The state has 23 districts and a population density of 551 persons per sq km, among the highest in the country. Punjab shares an international border with Pakistan and internal borders with Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana and Rajasthan, and its capital, Chandigarh, is a shared Union Territory with Haryana. The economy remains predominantly agrarian, anchored in the paddy wheat cropping cycle that powered the Green Revolution, but this legacy has produced acute groundwater stress. The state's own 2025-26 assessment placed groundwater extraction at 152.22 percent of the annually extractable resource, and in a statement to the Rajya Sabha on 9 March 2026, Member of Parliament Satnam Singh Sandhu said that 19 of the state's 23 districts fall under the groundwater dark zone; the department-wise section below sets out the underlying block-level CGWB data in more detail.
Punjab is one of India’s major agricultural states and has historically played an important role in national food security. Its economy is supported by agriculture and allied activities, industry, services, infrastructure and a large network of urban and rural settlements. At the same time, the state faces challenges related to agricultural diversification, groundwater and irrigation management, employment generation, infrastructure development, energy subsidies and environmental sustainability.
The National Pension System (NPS), regulated by the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA) under the PFRDA Act, 2013, was expanded to Non Resident Indians (NRIs) in 2015 to broaden access to a structured, market linked retirement savings mechanism. NPS was initially introduced for Central Government employees effective 1 January 2004 and extended voluntarily to all Indian citizens from 1 May 2009 under the All Citizen Model. The specific expansion enabling NRIs to subscribe occurred through amendments to the Foreign Exchange Management (Transfer or Issue of Security by a Person Resident Outside India) Regulations, 2000.