Thomas Isaac has been in and out of the national news in his role as Kerala's finance minister since 2018 for various path-breaking tax initiatives. But it is 2020 that he has become more prominent, principally in the GST council.
It is in no way a government of the economic Right. The Right is limited to religion and nationalism. The rest is as Left as the Congress or any other party, observes Shekhar Gupta.
Among other things, the agenda is likely to focus on increasing private investment, employment generation and giving relief to the farm sector
New ITR form may be simpler, but some changes could stump you.
A chunk of divestment till now has come from follow-on offerings in the Centre's two ETFs, Bharat-22 and CPSE. Now, there will be initial public offerings of Mazagon Docks, rail companies RVNL and IRFC and MSTC.
'Indian markets may initially react and follow the pattern of US and other global markets post US elections.'
It has always been accepted in various apex court rulings that economic policy is not justiciable. It can intervene only if the legislation is seen to violate fundamental rights says Sukumar Mukhopadhyay.
'The Budget numbers presented severely underestimate the magnitude of the unstated fiscal crisis that we went through in 2018-2019, which cannot be conceivably be fully reversed in 2019-2020,' points out Rathin Roy, director, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy.
'... the government provides adequate cash and kind support for the poorest of the poor for survival... ...conditional cash and skilling support for the economically poor to raise their incomes to adequate levels... ...and make functional arrangements for providing unemployment allowance to the vulnerable poor during disasters like the present one.'
The finance ministry is seeking to speed up deals with outside investors.
To address the supply crunch, CII has suggested leveraging the existing excess capacity in the Indian industry; rolling back import duty hike to look for alternative sources of imports; expanding credit to manufacturing units with quick loan sanctions, and one-time emergency waiver of non-performing asset regulations for three months.
The Supreme Court on Thursday termed as a "serious issue" a plea seeking initiation of removal process of former Chief Justice of India K G Balakrishnan from the post of National Human Rights Commission chairman for his alleged "misbehaviour" and purchase of benami properties.
A committee suggested that CSR expenditure be made tax deductible, in order to incentivise spending by companies. It also said that CSR should not be used as a means of resource-gap funding for government schemes.
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has said that the states were free to announce farm loan waivers if they had the fiscal space and that there would be no shortfall this year in divestment and non-tax revenues.
A glance back at some important events that occurred in 2018.