The obvious temptation for Mr Jaitley would be to achieve a better fiscal deficit figure than what he had promised in July.
Budget-makers in North Block are looking to maintain this fiscal status quo, in spite of tax revenues nowhere close to where the government wants and in spite of possible higher expenditure commitments.
Rejecting the Election Commission's suggestions on transparency and accountability in poll funding, the Congress party has expressed its inability to issue receipts to all persons or companies making donations to it for elections as it "neither practical nor possible".
The current salary paid by the Delhi government amounts to 17 per cent of the total expenditure.
The NRA will have representatives of IBPS, SSC and Indian Railways.
Fresh investments are constrained by tepid demand.
The candidates contesting the upcoming Lok Sabha polls will now be able to spend Rs 40 lakh, an increase of Rs 15 lakh from the last poll expenditure limit.
Behind the GBS figures, to be revealed in the Budget next week -- lies a fierce tug of war between Finance Minister P Chidambaram and Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia in which Prime Minister Manmohan Singh eventually threw his weight behind the finance minister.
A whopping Rs 30,000 crore is likely to be spent by the government, political parties and candidates in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections, making it by far the most expensive electoral exercise in Indian history.
Latest records show that only one MLA in the newly-elected Gujarat assembly spent more on the election expenses than the limit specified by the Election Commission, reports Vicky Nanjappa.
G C Murmu rarely speaks in public and when he does, his statements are always in lockstep with the thinking within this government.
There are 1.9 million employees and 650,000 pensioners in Maharashtra.
Had it been an election of digital campaigns, the cost of the 2019 election would have been far less than what it actually is.
The findings of the report showed consumer spending falling for the first time in over four decades in 2017-18.
The counsel appearing for the poll panel told a bench headed by Chief Justice S A Bobde that Nath's petition has become infructuous as the campaigning has ended and the voting is on Tuesday.
According to the Approach Paper to the 12th Plan, the Commission has pegged a plan expenditure of Rs 5.83 lakh crore (Rs 5.83 trillion) for 2013-14, which is around 12 per cent more than the budgeted plan expenditure for the current fiscal.
Economic reforms seem to be on a slow train, while good old fiscal populism is alive and flourishing.
BJP tops the poll expenditure charts for the last Lok Sabha elections, having spent more money than all other political parties including the Congress.
Among the states due for election next year are AP, Haryana and Odisha, which have a fair share of agri credit. If these states individually announced debt relief, the combined waiver would be at least around Rs 600 bn to Rs 700 bn. Clearly, this will be a frightening challenge for Indian banks.
The Union Cabinet on Tuesday gave its nod to a bill to merge the three municipal corporations in Delhi, sources in the government said.
The Election Commission is set to ask the government to amend laws to disqualify candidates listed in chargesheets for bribing candidates, a move which comes days after it cancelled a Tamil Nadu assembly bypoll following allegations of use of money to influence electors.
In a bid to ensure free and fair elections and curb the use of money power, the Election Commission has disqualified as many as 2,171 candidates for failing to furnish details of expenditure incurred while contesting Parliamentary and assembly polls.
The announcement of a deferral is expected to be part of Finance Minister Arun Jaitley's Budget speech on February 29.
With the Election Commission taking extensive steps to check misuse of money during polls in Bihar, top politicians and candidates are now voluntarily appearing before expenditure observers deputed at airports and other places to declare their cash. The EC has recently activated an Election Expenditure Monitoring (EEM) cell at its headquarters in Delhi to curb the use of illegal money.
'They have all committed that during campaign period, they will not allow anything which is adversely effecting level playing field be allowed on their platforms'
Recognising the malaise of paid news, the Election Commission has proposed to the government to make it an electoral offence even as it continues to tackle it itself by monitoring the expenditures of candidates.
Petrol price can go down to Rs 75 a litre across the country if brought under the ambit of the Goods and Services Tax (GST), but there is a lack of political will, which is keeping Indian oil product prices at one of the highest in the world, economists at SBI said on Thursday.
Jaitley said focus is on larger expenditure on social sector.
The Election Commission has examined the menace of "paid news" that was rampant during the last Lok Sabha elections and decided to include the cost of such news in the expenditure of candidates to check if they exceed the ceiling on expenditure by resorting to "paid news" instead of issuing advertisements
The poll holding exercise has witnessed a whopping jump by 80 times to Rs 846 crore since 1952 when it was mere Rs 10 crore.
The first spending item on the chopping block is capital expenditure, followed by operating costs and overheads, including sales and marketing expenses.
The government is trying to promote infrastructure development through PPP projects and has suggested the state should pick projects under this mode in a big way.
'All of us have believed in decentralisation. You may not like property taxation, neither do I. My solution is that the Centre does the tax collection, but we can give a matching grant instead of redistribution,' says the outgoing CEA, Arvind Subramanian.
Ebix had signed the agreement last year to acquire Gurugram-based Yatra Online for an enterprise value of $338 million (about Rs 2,327 crore) in an all-stock deal. The deal was supposed to conclude in the October-December quarter after regulatory approvals but went through several extensions, according to regulatory filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
Under the Bhavantar Bhugtan Yojana, the state pays a portion of the loss incurred by farmers for selling below the MSP, capped up to a limit.
Cash collections accounted for a whopping 63 per cent of total funds or over Rs 2,100 crore garnered by various political parties during all state assembly polls between 2004 and 2015, a study showed on Monday.
In an effort to curb money power in elections, the poll authorities in Andhra Pradesh have constituted special committees to monitor the expenditure of candidates on a daily basis in the bypolls to 12 assembly seats scheduled to be held on July 27.
The Planning Commission's latest poverty estimates, based on the 2011-12 consumption expenditure survey, shows that across India, the number of people living below the poverty line declined by more than 15 percentage points -- from 2004-05 to 2011-12 and from 37 per cent to 21.9 per cent.
As India emerges from the COVID-19 crisis, the ninth budget under the Modi government, including an interim one, is widely expected to focus on boosting spending on job creation and rural development, generous allocations for development schemes, putting more money in the hands of the average taxpayer and easing rules to attract foreign investments.
The finance minister defended the change in the tax rates.
