The Union budget presented on Saturday saw a 9.8% increase in the allocation for the healthcare sector to ₹99,858.56 crore from ₹90,958.68 crore in the previous financial year but overall health allocation remained below 2% of the budget. The share of health in the FY26 budget increased marginally to 1.97% from 1.9% in FY25 and...
Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman has followed a stable trajectory in all her Union Budgets since 2019. This year’s budget speech, though, was unusual in not mentioning allocations for specific Infrastructure sectors. The unsaid implication being – execute and implement existing projects in large sectors like highways and railways. Of the allocation to Infrastructure of an...
This year’s budget comes at a critical juncture when the bounce-back from the Covid-19 pandemic seems to have exhausted itself and the economy risks sliding into the low rates of growth witnessed right before the pandemic. Furthermore, as I’ve highlighted before and as mentioned in the Economic Survey, the pace of creation of regular wage...