Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday announced a Rs 11.11 lakh crore spending on infrastructure and vowed to continue reforms as she resisted resorting to populist measures in Modi government's last Budget before general elections, instead choosing to stay on the path of cutting deficit while bolstering measures for focus groups.
Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on Saturday hailed the party's performance in the Karnataka assembly polls as the victory of politics that unites the country.
'In India those who want change cannot bring about change, and those who can bring about change do not want change.'
The number of poor people in India fell by about 415 million between 2005-06 and 2019-21, a "historic change" and a demonstration that the Sustainable Development Goal target of reducing at least by half the proportion of men, women and children of all ages living in poverty by 2030 is possible to achieve, even at a large scale, according to the UN.
State-owned Indian Oil Corporation (IOC), Adani-Total Gas Ltd and Shell were among the 29 companies that bid and bought natural gas to be produced from the deepest field in the KG-D6 block of Reliance Industries Ltd and bp, sources said. IOC walked away with almost half of the 6 million standard cubic meters per day of gas sold in an e-auction on Wednesday while state-owned gas utility GAIL bought 0.7 mmscmd, Adani-Total Gas Ltd 0.4 mmscmd, Shell 0.5 mmscmd, GSPC 0.25 mmscmd and IGS another 0.5 mmscmd, two sources with knowledge of the matter said. Reliance-bp on Wednesday held an e-auction for sale of gas from the MJ field in their eastern offshore KG-D6 block after incorporating the government's new marketing rules to give CNG-selling city gas companies first priority over supplies.
Migrant workers play a very vital role in building the nation and their rights cannot be ignored at all, the Supreme Court said on Thursday while asking the Centre to devise a mechanism so that they receive food grains without ration cards.
According to sources in the Congress, eight legislators are likely to be sworn in as ministers along with them.
Karnataka chief minister-designate Siddaramaiah and deputy chief minister-designate D K Shivakumar on Friday discussed the modalities of cabinet formation in the state with the party leadership in Delhi and are learnt to have shortlisted some names of ministers and their portfolios.
Maharashtra is expecting its active caseload to reach 11.9 lakh by April 30, compared to the current active caseload of 5.64 lakh, Thackeray said.
The challenge for the RBI in 2024 is likely to be less about containing elevated inflation and more about curbing excessive financial market exuberance and a 'problem of plenty', notes Sajjid Chinoy, Chief India Economist JP Morgan.
India's GDP growth will slow down to 5.5 per cent in FY24 from the 6.9 per cent expected in the current fiscal 2022-23, a Swiss brokerage said on Wednesday. The slowdown was attributed to slowing global growth and tightening of monetary policies in the report by economists at UBS India. It said India will be among the "lesser affected economies" in the world, but made it clear that the world's fifth largest economy is not immune from global headwinds.
Officials said 13 more families living in houses with huge cracks were moved by the administration to safe locations on Sunday.
Addressing the Grah Pravesham programme, to hand over new houses to their owners, via video conferencing, Modi said his government has given topmost priority to providing houses to the poor people.
'As our per capita income increases and various demographic segments emerge, the need for various kinds of protection and risk covers will become even more explicit.'
There are millions of Indian women who avoid the responsibility of managing their finances due to a variety of reasons, including cultural and social conditioning.
'We cannot leave our entire unorganised sector to the vagaries of market forces.'
Four National Disaster Response Force teams are engaged in rescue work, he added. The village has around 50 houses, of which 17 were buried under the landslide, the official said.
'Because of the callous attitude of the railway administration, they don't take care of safety.'
Although the Disaster Management Act for Covid containment measures, considered a hindrance in conducting the census, was withdrawn in March this year the Centre has not taken any further action on conducting the much-delayed population enumeration.
Can the newly-minted Jal Shakti ministry bring water into some 19 crore Indian households that have never had taps or heard the sound of flowing water, wonders Vinayak Chatterjee.
The forthcoming budget needs to delay fiscal consolidation, instead should focus more on supporting the pandemic battered-economy and boost consumption demand by offering income tax soaps and cutting fuel taxes, says a report. In a pre-budget report, India Ratings said it expects the new budget to consolidate and strengthen the plan set out in the last budget, rather than trying out new things by continue with the revenue and capital expenditure pattern of FY'22 to provide stability and consolidation to the past/ongoing efforts, and to focus on boosting demand by generating employment opportunities in areas/sectors that have been impacted more by the pandemic. The report therefore expects the finance minister to delay fiscal consolidation and make it to be a gradual and calibrated process, thus ensuring the necessary fiscal support that the economy needs is available till the recovery acquires its own momentum.
There should have been a focus on sanitation and not on littering or garbage. Absence of sanitation affects the health of children, explains Aakar Patel.
The farm sector has been resilient to the COVID-19 shock and is estimated to grow at 3.9 per cent this fiscal, the Economic Survey said on Monday, while suggesting to the government to give priority to crop diversification, allied farm sectors and alternative fertilisers like Nano urea. The Economic Survey 2021-22 also pitched for increasing agriculture research and development (R&D) and organic farming, besides use of new technologies like drones. "The performance of the agriculture and the allied sector has been resilient to the COVID-19 shock. ...Growth in allied sectors including livestock, dairying and fisheries has been the major drivers of overall growth in the sector," the Survey said. The agriculture sector has experienced buoyant growth in the past two years.
The middle class is a big force to fulfil dreams of a prosperous and developed India and our government has taken many decisions to empower it, the prime minister said.
Rebuffing petroleum ministry, Siddaramaiah launches Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana-like scheme months before state polls
'The decision to supply free food grains is not an economically sound decision because the government will find it very difficult in future to charge anything for food grains.'
"We (at the cabinet) discussed the hijab row, but as the high court is hearing the matter, we felt it is not appropriate for the cabinet to take any further decisions on the issue today. It was decided to wait for the court's verdict before taking any decision," Law and Parliamentary Affairs Minister J C Madhuswamy said.
To the extent that monetary variables affect investment, the weather, thus, looks far less clement.
India's macroeconomic situation is certainly better than what it was a year ago, eminent economist Pinaki Chakraborty said on Monday, while expressing hope that the country will be back on the path of economic growth if there is no major third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. In an interview with PTI, Chakraborty, who is the director of the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP), said that inflation may remain at an elevated level as there was a significant fiscal and monetary expansion in the last 18 months. "The current macroeconomic situation is certainly much better than what it was one year back. We are seeing recovery in most sectors," he said. Chakraborty noted that COVID-19 vaccination has been going on at a very fast rate in India.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Wednesday raised the personal income tax rebate limit, doled out sops on small savings and announced one of the biggest hikes in capital spending in the past decade as she did a tight rope walk in the Budget between staying fiscally prudent and meeting public expectations in the year before general elections.
Addressing party MPs at the general body meeting of the Congress Parliamentary Party in the central hall of Parliament, she said when facing a significant national challenge, it has been the tradition in our country to bring Parliament into confidence.
French IT firm Atos is planning to hire 15,000 people in the next 12-18 months in India, including climate experts, as it moves towards decarbonisation by 2028, chief operating officer (COO) Nourdine Bihmane said. "India is a strategic market for Atos. "We have been present here for the last 30 years, and we have grown organically since. "People and innovation are our two key drivers to build momentum. "India represents one-third of our total workforce," Bihmane said. Atos has around 40,000 employees in India.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Tuesday slashed India's growth forecast for 2022-23 (FY23) by 80 basis points to 7.4 per cent, citing less favourable external conditions and rapid policy tightening by the central bank. In its update to the April World Economic Outlook, the IMF said that though a global recession in 2022 was ruled out with a growth estimate of 3.2 per cent, the balance of risks was squarely to the downside, driven by a wide range of factors that could adversely affect the global economic performance. "The risk of recession is particularly prominent in 2023, when in several economies growth is expected to bottom out, household savings accumulated during the pandemic will have declined, and even small shocks could cause economies to stall.
India's growth projection released by the latest World Economic Outlook remains unchanged from its previous WEO (World Economic Outlook) update of July this summer but is a three-percentage point in 2021 and 1.6 percentage point drop from its April projections. According to the latest WEO update, released ahead of the annual meeting of the IMF and the World Bank, the world is expected to grow at 5.9 per cent in 2021 and 4.9 per cent in 2022.
Auto sales, particularly of two-wheelers, may not bounce back immediately and may take another two months to come back on track even as car bookings have started seeing an initial uptick. Various states started Unlock 2.0 on Monday, following a fall in the number of Covid-19 cases. Auto sales were hit in May following the impact of Covid-led lockdowns.
The home minister said the northeast and the Left-wing extremism-affected areas in the country are tribal-dominated regions and security is a precursor to development there.
Omkeshwar Singh, Head, Rank MF, a mutual fund investment platform, answers your queries.
The growth opportunity for a business, people running the business, governance structure at a company, technology adoption and the firm's belief in frugality are the list of priorities which should be considered before choosing a stock to invest in, Jhunjunwala said.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman spelled out water, its management, clean rivers as one of the 10 points of vision for the next decade.
