Category Economy and Infrastructure

Good and Services Tax (GST) Collection: India’s progress towards ‘One Nation, One Sales Tax’

The progress of India’s Goods and Services Tax (GST), based on taxing value-addition, introduced as a dual tax levied by both the centre and the states, in a short period since 2017 when it was introduced, has been commendable. The GST has helped India progress towards the vision of ‘one nation, one sales tax’; and has helped reduce transaction costs of businesses at all levels, while facilitating lower logistics costs toward greater global competitiveness.  To implement GST, a Constitutional amendment was needed as in the then-existing Constitution, there was no provision for levying sales tax on goods by the Union government, and the states could not levy sales tax on services.

Video: The Cities We Need towards India@2047 | Panel Discussion | Action Aid India & IMPRI | IIC Annex

The Cities We Need towards India@2047 | A Panel Discussion | Action Aid India & IMPRI | IIC Annex ActionAid Association India, and IMPRI Impact and Policy Research Institute, New Delhi, invites you to A Panel Discussion on The Cities…

g20 urban agenda impri

Video: India’s G20 Presidency & the Urban Agenda for Developing Countries | Panel Discussion | IIC Annexe

India’s G20 Presidency & the Urban Agenda for Developing Countries | A Panel Discussion | Action Aid India & IMPRI | IIC Annexe ActionAid Association India, and IMPRI Impact and Policy Research Institute, New Delhi, invite you to A Panel…

The Other ‘Fund Crunch’: How India’s Political Funding limits Inc’s Global Opportunities

If Indian companies are to go global, find global partners accountable to their shareholders and laws that call for clean operations that are at least noiseless, if not quite squeaky and receive inexpensive capital from abroad, Indian politics has to clean itself up.

While we are all proud of India's democracy, few of us bother to fund any political party. We are content to let parties fund themselves by mobilising funds as they traditionally have from the time of the freedom struggle when industrialists like G D Birla used to fund the Congress. But most such funding was informal, with no structured, transparent disclosure of who funded which party and to what extent.

Budget 2023-24: Impact on Urban India & Local Governance

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.

Political Roots of the Budget’s Sobriety

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.

Economic Survey, Union Budget, Labour Law Reforms and Unorganised Sector

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.

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