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).
The power sector was not the only challenge in the early 2010s for India. New inter-State electricity flows were accompanied by fast growth, which revealed transmission deficiencies, insufficient voltage management, protection vulnerabilities and investments that were not always easily accommodated by traditional project financing methods.
The second generation rural transformation programme, FOCUS 2.0, focuses on a challenging policy question in Mizoram: how to increase the productivity and profitability of upland agriculture without degrading the ecological processes and community institutions upon which rural livelihoods rely? The programme received approval from the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) in November 2025 and will benefit all 11 districts of Mizoram, 700 villages and 75,000 households (about 150,000 people).
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 Self Help Entrepreneur- Livelihoods and Enterprise Application for Prosperity and Sustainability (SHE -LEAPS) was launched on 29th June 2026 at Rashtriya Gramin Vikas Sammelan, in New Delhi. The application, introduced in the context of expanding the Lakhpati Didi target from 3 to 6 crore, aims to strengthen the rural women enterprises associated with Self-Help Groups.
Before 2014, industrial approvals in undivided Andhra Pradesh and in most Indian states were characterised by bureaucratic delay, repeated documentation, and poor inter-departmental coordination. Entrepreneurs routinely visited multiple offices, resubmitted the same information to different departments, and waited months for clearances that had no statutory deadline. For a newly formed state seeking to establish its industrial credibility and attract capital, this bottleneck was a first-order constraint on growth.
The Government of Telangana responded by enacting the TS-iPASS Act, 2014, establishing a single-window, time-bound, and transparent clearance mechanism for industrial projects later rebranded TG-iPASS. The legislation was among the earliest state-level attempts in India to convert “ease of doing business” rhetoric into an enforceable statutory right, granting entrepreneurs a right to clearance within fixed timelines and a right to know the reasons for any delay.
The National Family Benefit Scheme (NFBS) was introduced in 1995 as one of the original components of the National Social Assistance Programme (NSAP). NSAP came into effect on 15 August 1995 in pursuance of Article 41 of the Constitution, which directs the State to provide public assistance in cases of unemployment, old age, sickness, disablement and other situations of undeserved want, within the limits of its economic capacity and development.