Budget 2024 in new NDA govt

• Mitali Mukherjee in The Wire summarised the Economic Survey for the most part, “like a fantasy novel because it is crafted for and about a country many Indian voters may not recognise… In this part fantasy, part mythology document, there is no jobs problem, there is no household distress and social media is the source of all evils.”

• According to a report in Free Press Journal, the share of education in the combined expenditure by the Centre and the states fell to its lowest in at least 14 years, revealed the Economic Survey 2023-24 tabled in the Parliament on Monday. Even in terms of the percentage of gross domestic product (GDP), allocation for education is at its nadir.

• The report, which comes ahead of the Union budget 2024-25, showed that education accounted for only 9% of the overall spending by the central and state governments in the fiscal year 2021-22, when the country was recovering from the devastating second Covid wave.

• The seventh Budget presented by FM Nirmala Sitharaman generated no great expectations or buzz. The Economic Survey confirms that real wages stagnate in rural areas, but it did not comment on this or the possible reasons behind it.

• The Economic Survey also suggested that the inflation-targeting framework should exclude food, as higher food prices are supply-induced.

• It also suggested that the MGNREGS-demand rise did not suggest economic distress.

• The Survey also highlighted the steep rise of retail investors entering the derivatives trading market and the financialisation of economies, which it warned against, arguing that all stakeholders should direct savings to the most productive investments.

• The budget carries an allocation of more than Rs. 3 lakh crore for schemes intended to benefit women and girls.

• The FM also announced that increasing the participation of women in the workforce will be a priority.

• Muslim organisations decry NCPCR and UP government’s move to shift students forcibly from madrasas to government schools. The continuous interference in the functioning of madrasas, especially in BJP-run states has invited critique from Muslim organisations and other civil society groups. The AIMPLB also raised questions on this unnecessary order.

• Two women in Madhya Pradesh’s Rewa district were horrifically treated as a response to their protest. The two women named Mamta Pandey and Asha Pandey, were protesting road construction over their leased land, and were partially buried after a truck allegedly dumped gravel over them near Hinota Jorot village in Rewa. A video also showed the two women partially buried to their waist and the locals trying to rescue them.

More than 120 killed, mostly women, in India stampede at religious event in Hathras: earlier in July, a stampede broke out at a religious event (satsang) of self-styled godman Baba Bhole. The dead were mostly women, with one man Vinod Kumar losing three generations of his family: “I am devastated. I lost my mother, wife and daughter. No woman is left in my family now. I am now left with my three sons,” he said. The 121 people died in the stampede as the devotees, most of them women, surged towards the Hindu preacher who was addressing a crowd of nearly 250,000 people under a giant tent in Hathras district’s Phulrai Mughal Garhi village. Authorities later said the preacher, Suraj Pal Singh, a former police constable known in the region as Bhole Baba, only had permission for 80,000 people. His whereabouts remain unknown.

• Row breaks out over widow of Kirti-Chakra awardee Captain Anshuman Singh: In an unseemly row on social media, after Captain Anshuman Singh was posthumously awarded the Kirti Chakra, the parents of the slain soldier raised questions on the army’s Next of Kin’s policies, the widow’s character and accused her of taking away the Kirti Chakra and assets and entitlements. Captain Singh was posthumously conferred the Kirti Chakra, India’s second-highest peacetime gallantry award, by President Droupadi Murmu on July 5 during an investiture ceremony. Smriti and her mother-in-law Manju Singh accepted the award. The parents also mentioned in interviews that they offered for Smriti, the widow to marry Anshuman’s younger brother and accused her of “running away” and not staying with them. Later the army clarified that the insurance, PF and assets are disbursed as divided by the officer in his will, and the pension goes to wife. Reports also clarified that the Army Group Insurance Fund (AGIF) of ₹1 crore was split between his wife and in addition, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath had announced ₹50 lakh in aid, of which ₹35 lakh went to his wife and ₹15 lakh to his parents. The misogynistic slander against Smriti later led to a wave of social media posts in her support and led to a debate on how widows are treated in Indian society. The soldier, posted as a medical officer in the Siachen Glacier area, died after suffering severe burns and injuries in a fire accident in July last year.

• IIT-Madras prize winner highlights mass genocide’ in Palestine, criticizes tech giants’ role in the oppression of Palestinians: Dhananjay Balakrishnan, the winner of the Governor’s Prize at the convocation of the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras on July 19 is being lauded after bringing up the genocide in his speech, saying: “Now I feel like I will be doing myself and everything I believe in a great injustice if I do not use the stage I am presented with to say something very important. This is a call for action. There is a mass genocide going on in Palestine. People are dying in vast numbers and there is no visible end in sight…Why should we be bothered by this, you ask? Because STEM as a field in itself has historically been used to advance the ulterior motive of imperial powers, such as Israel…As engineering students we work hard to get top-level jobs at tech giants which offer very lucrative pays and great benefits. However, these tech giants control various aspects of our lives today, as you know better than anyone. Many of these prestigious companies are also directly and indirectly implicated in the war against Palestine, providing the state of Israel with technology – technology that’s used to kill.”

• Gender and Social Inequalities During the Pandemic: A team of 10 researchers from the UK, the US and Europe have studied the mortality impacts of the pandemic in India by sex, social group and age. Their peer-reviewed paper has been published in an American journal. According to the study, women experienced a life expectancy decline of one year greater than men. This contrasts with patterns in most other countries and may be due to gender inequality. Also, marginalised social groups in India saw larger declines in life expectancy compared to privileged upper-caste people, worsening existing disparities.