While many areas compete for resources, defence, education, and adaptation deserve focus for maximum impact, suggests Laveesh Bhandari.
India is already a heavyweight in global farm trade in pockets such as rice exports, but experts are urging a pivot from a subsidy- and procurement-driven mindset to a productivity and nutrition strategy that still shields farmers from volatility.
Nirmala Sitharaman moved into her Kartavya Bhavan office on October 2, in time to get the work on the Budget 2026-2027 going.
Job creation, improving farm productivity, and mobilising public funds for infrastructure development were some of the issues that figured during the interaction between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and economists ahead of the 2025-26 Union Budget. The prime minister on Tuesday met eminent economists and sectoral experts at NITI Aayog to hear their views and suggestions for the upcoming Budget. Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman is scheduled to present the Budget for 2025-26 in the Lok Sabha on February 1, 2025.
Bibek Debroy was one of the very few economists not bound by any single area of expertise and was simultaneously curious about economics and politics, myths and maths, chess and chemistry, and what not, remembers Laveesh Bhandari.
'The Budget needs to focus more on social welfare schemes.'
When one part of the government comes out with a serious and objective piece on how the government itself has been responsible for creating food inflation, hopefully the government is more likely to take note.
Corruption in public life is not as much of a threat to economic growth as political instability. Cross-sectional and time-series evidence would show this.
Have inequality levels, as represented by the Gini coefficient, risen from 30.3 in 1983 to 34.3 in 2004-05?
In the case of Air India, even competition could not compete with the government.
Delhi Development Authority's land deal to Reliance Industries throws up larger issues of governance.
A better system of operating central and state PSEs, and indeed all commercial activities of the government, would require eliminating the current system that oversees them.
With time the start-up action plan will need to be tweaked and will need to move in the direction of removing both hurdles and privileges.
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