By Indian standards post-liberalization, and especially by the standards of the Modi government’s pre-pandemic budgets, Budget 2023 is huge: 14.9% of GDP. The government proposes to use its Rs 45 lakh crore expenditure heft to not just boost growth but also to expand the presence of the state to sectors that had escaped its reach. Whether this is a good thing, or a bad thing will depend on the observer’s ideological predilections.
This year’s budget is a bag of misplaced government spending priorities and misses some crucial challenges facing urban development.
The last full Union budget of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government continues to be plagued with the idea that “the private capital will ameliorate some of the basic problems of India and that large capital-intensive technologies will usher in development, including inclusive development.”
How fallacious is this argument? We have seen this in the past three decades. The structural difference brought in by Manmohan Singh’s budget in 1991 was to “shift India’s economy away from the hands of the government to the hands of private enterprise, and embraced free trade.
How come the government has shown sober responsibility rather than wanton populism in the last full Budget available to it before the 2024 General Election? We see many pundits struggle with this puzzle on television and in newspaper columns and either remain puzzled or conclude that this government stands tall, beyond the temptations of expedience to which ordinary mortals are prone.
The Economic Survey 2022-23 is an information provider with little analytical thrust, at least on labour-related matters.
The Economic Survey (ES) 2022-23 prepared the ground for the focus points in the Union Budget 2023. The story on the labour front is as follows.
New India’s Economic Transformation and Union Budget 2023-24 | Panel Discussion | #EconDialogue #IMPRI Center for the Study of Finance and Economics (CSFE), IMPRI Impact and Policy Research Institute, New Delhi invites you to an IMPRI #WebPolicyTalk series: The State…
Employment, Livelihoods, and Union Budget 2023-24 | Panel Discussion | #EmploymentDebate #IMPRI Center for Work and Welfare (CWW), IMPRI Impact and Policy Research Institute, New Delhi invites you to an IMPRI #WebPolicyTalk series: The State of Employment and Livelihoods- #EmploymentDebate A Panel…
How do donations via electoral bonds funded by legal or illegal money help curb undue influence on policymakers? Electoral bonds provide an additional of such funds.
The Union Government initiated the Electoral Bonds scheme, announced in the Union Budget 2017–18, on January 2, 2018. The aim was “to cleanse the system of political funding in the country”. While many other issues are also germane, the moot question is will this goal be achieved.