Bhaskar Chakravorti in The Indian Express – “Budget’s Blind Eye”

Budget’s Blind Eye: It fails to address dismal productivity, not just in agriculture, but across all workers

Now, it remains to be seen if some of the goodies here — for example, a tax exemption for income up to Rs 5 lakh to appease the middle class or a Rs 6,000 annual cash handout to poor farmers in a scheme that will cost Rs 75,000 crore annually added to a scheme to provide a monthly pension for workers in the unorganised sector after they turn 60 years old — will exacerbate the fiscal deficit significantly enough and whether that ought to be a cause for worry in the future. That said, I am glad that the farmers at the proverbial bottom of the agricultural pyramid and the workers in the unorganised sector — which pretty much covers most of the worker pyramid — were offered some form of an economic cushion, even if a rather thin one.

Read the full piece from Dean Chakravorti in The Indian Express