The government is ready for a debate in Parliament on price rise once Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman recovers from Covid-19, the Bharatiya Janata Party asserted on Wednesday and targeted Rahul Gandhi, saying he may be "unproductive politically" but should not hurt the legislature's productivity.
This will violate the time-honoured convention that a government elected for a five-year tenure presents only five full Budgets, but the NDA government will no doubt present it as yet another initiative of Mr Modi.
Going by the number of changes Mr Jaitley's next Budget is likely to see, he will go down in the history of Budget-making as the finance minister who ushered in the largest number of changes in a single Budget, says A K Bhattacharya.
7 key areas that the Budget must address to re-energise the infrastructure sector, suggests Vinayak Chatterjee.
The tax would create a single market in India for the first time.
Whether it was the MGNREGS or the NFSA or the Aadhaar-based DBT scheme for cash transfer, the Modi government has built on the basic architecture created by the Singh government. Policy makers in the Modi government, instead of discarding them as products of the previous political regime, worked on them, expanded their scope and reach, and used new tools to improve their performance, explains A K Bhattacharya.
In fact, no other recent Union Budget has held so much significance for the Indian economy as the one to be presented in about six weeks from now, notes A K Bhattacharya.
Delivering the key mote address at the Citi's Investor Summit, Jaitley hoped that as a professional organisation the Reserve Bank will take 'the best decision'.
Govt looking for common ground on GST; hopes to pass it soon.
Finance Minister Piyush Goyal: 'I hope the Congress governments and other states like West Bengal, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, Andhra, Telangana will support our effort to bring petrol and diesel into the GST regime.'
Hindi film industry hopes to get some tax relief from the upcoming Budget 2015-16.
The council decided not to levy any additional tax on small petrol and diesel cars of up to 1200 cc as well as on hybrid ones.
Net direct tax collection in the April-June quarter of the current fiscal rose by 41 per cent to Rs 3,54,569.74 crore, Minister of State for Finance Pankaj Chaudhary informed the Lok Sabha. During the April-June period of 2021-22, the government had collected a net direct tax of Rs 2,50,881.08 crore. At the same time, net indirect tax collection including Goods and Services Tax (GST) and custom duty increased by 9.4 per cent to Rs 3,44,056 crore as against Rs 3,14,476 crore in the first quarter of the previous fiscal, he said in a written reply.
She also took a swipe at the Bharatiya Janata Party over its defeat in the just-concluded Himachal Pradesh assembly elections, saying the ruling party's president could not hold on to his home state. "Who is the Pappu now?" she asked.
Also on the anvil is abolition of distinction between Plan and non-Plan expenditure and replacing it with capital and revenue expenditure
Amendments to RBI Act likely soon
'Urjit Patel was not quite the picture of courage, but even he turned, he had to turn.' 'Perhaps there is something that is far more sinister than what we are aware of, which is the reason for his resigation.'
Apart from Smriti, Ravi Shankar Prasad and Ananth Kumar took over as law and parliamentary affairs ministers respectively.
After the finance minister directed public sector banks to join the account aggregator (AA) ecosystem, 5-6 major ones, including State Bank of India (SBI) and Bank of Baroda are expected to go live by July-end. Sahmati, an industry alliance for the AA ecosystem, has been working with PSU banks to get them onboarded for quite some time now. So far, Union Bank of India and Punjab National Bank (PNB) have gone live on the AA ecosystem. While Union Bank has been live for a while, PNB went live earlier this month.
Empowered committee to meet on July 13 to discuss Central Sales Tax, Goods and Services Tax.
Kerala's tax authorities are also reviewing other e-commerce companies for similar discrepancies, and might fine more defaulters.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday said the Indian economy is witnessing a strong recovery after a long and strict lockdown. Addressing a press conference to announce more stimulus measures to boost growth, she said macro-economic indicators are pointing towards recovery. She noted that COVID-19 active cases have declined from over 10 lakh to 4.89 lakh with case fatality rate (CFR) at 1.47 per cent.
The deficit stood over Rs 8 trillion in the first seven months of the current financial year. Non-tax revenues, comprising transfers from the RBI and dividends of the public sector units, shored up the Centre's revenues.
In its essence, GST is a national level system of value added taxation of goods and services, says Shankar Acharya.
A realistic approach towards tax and stock taking is necessary, rather than the old narrative of bringing all petroleum products under GST and playing the blame-the-state game.
Indications are that the DMK combine will win more seats than the AIADMK and BJP, but is facing a tough fight in about half a dozen from the rest, predicts N Sathiya Moorthy of the electoral contest in Tamil Nadu.
Due to major policy reforms announced recently by the government, India is poised for good growth.
There was a "broad agreement" on five issues over which the 18 parties will target the government
Party justifies total washout of day's proceedings in Rajya Sabha, citing Dalit atrocity, insult to Congress CMs and the GST bill.
As per practice a vote-on-account or approval for essential government spending for a limited period is taken in the election year and a full-fledged budget presented by the new government.
The finance minister has labelled about 65 per cent of the fuel excise revenue as cess, including the restructured road and infrastructure cess
Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray met Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday and discussed issues related to the Maratha reservation, pending GST compensation and the proposed Metro car shed in Kanjur.
Speaking at the all-party meeting called by the government, Modi said, "People have great expectations and that is why Parliament should function and be productive."
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and chief ministers of states may soon have an in-person interaction on a common platform for the first time since 2019. The seventh meeting of the Governing Council of NITI Aayog is likely to be held in late June or early July, Business Standard has learnt from sources in the Centre and a state. While the date and other details are yet to be finalised, it is learnt that there will be a conclave of chief secretaries of states and Union Territories in Dharamshala, Himachal Pradesh, on June 14 and 15, which will decide the agenda of the Council meeting to be held at a later date.
For his first Budget in July 2014, Jaitley inherited a fiscal deficit target of 4.1 per cent of GDP. From 4.1 per cent, the fiscal deficit came down to 3.4 per cent by 2018-19, with two slippages from the budgeted targets, in 2017-18 and 2018-19, the former due to introduction of the GST, says Arup Roychoudhury.
'It is important to improve the quality of spending.'
Facing an acute shortage of COVID-19 vaccines, the Odisha government on Monday decided to float a global tender for procuring the vaccine to inoculate the states entire population, Chief Secretary S C Mohapatra said.
The winter session of Parliament is set to be stormy with Opposition parties closing ranks to target the government on issues including 'intolerance' even as the ruling dispensation expressed its readiness to discuss all issues.
Years of wait before DTC, GST are rolled out
