News18.com Daybreak | Budget Day Coverage, Congress Wins Rajasthan Bypoll and Other Stories You May Have Missed
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has hailed his government’s last pre-poll budget as a “big step” towards achieving Ease of Business and Ease of Living. Farmers, rural India and healthcare were the main focus of Budget 2018, but the middle class hopes for Income Tax relief were dashed.
Watch the full speech here.
You can read the full text of the speech here.
What will cost more and what will cost less? Find out here.
Much to the disappointment of the salaried class of the country, Jaitley did not alter income tax rates.
Already dubbed as Modicare, the National Health Protection Scheme announced by Jaitley during his Budget 2018 speech has only one new factor – monetary increase from Rs 1 lakh to Rs 5 lakh per family. This scheme, which was first announced in 206-17, went without an approval from the Union Cabinet so far. In its new avatar as "one of the largest healthcare programmes in the world" as Jaitley claims, the scheme will now provide Rs 5 lakh per family and aims to cover around 10 crore families or 50 crore people. Is ‘Modicare’ an old wine in new bottle?
In an over one hour speech, the Finance Minister mentioned ‘women’ 11 times and announced allocations to schemes, with focus on women’s participation in the same. He proposed extending the Ujjwala Scheme to 8 crore poor women to increase the target of providing free connection to 8 crore poor women. He increased loans to SHGs of women increased to about Rs 42,500 crore in 2016-17, growing 37% over the previous year. He reduced women employees' contribution to 8% for first three years of their employment against existing rate of 12% or 10% with no change in employers' contribution. Jaitley announced Rs 24,700 crore for the ministry for the year 2018-19, an increase of around 11.78% from 2017-18 which stood at Rs 22,095 crore.
The central government increased ‘health and education cess’ by one percent to fund health and education sector schemes in the Union Budget 2018-19. This increase will enable the government to collect an estimated additional amount of Rs 11,000 crore for the health & education schemes. Experts say that by doing this the government is shifting the responsibility on the tax payers to fund education and health needs.
Last year, the total defence budget was Rs. 2.62 lakh crores and the capital expenditure was Rs. 86,529 crore. This year, the Finance Minister said the focus was on defence production and inviting investment in the sector. Here are 5 highlights for the defence sector.
Slated to witness assembly elections later this year, Madhya Pradesh failed to find much out of the Union Budget 2018, especially for farmers who are battling falling farm prices and burgeoning debt.
As anticipated, the Budget is oriented towards sustainable electoral growth. The focus on the farm sector and poor and tax relief for the fixed income classes is expected to positively impact the health of (vote) banks and generation of (political) capital. Effective delivery will determine whether these measures result in electoral buoyancy at the macro level. The big question that emerges from this budget is, what took Jaitley so long? If he wanted to set up 115 aspirational districts featuring new models of development, he could have done so in his first budget and by this time, the results of these experiments would have been evident.
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The Ajmer and Alwar Lok Sabha by-elections have turned out to be a study in contrast in political one-upmanship in the run-up and aftermath. The ruling BJP was sanguine about its chances of victory while the opposition Congress was coy, even overawed by the occasion. “Congress is afraid to contest and has already lost the elections,” claimed BJP National Vice-President in-charge of Rajasthan Avinash Rai Khanna in the run-up to the by-elections, which were being seen as prestige battle and a referendum of sorts on the Vasundhara Raje government. Now, a month after the ‘young and the restless’ leaders of Congress president Rahul Gandhi’s brigade decided to wait for a better opportunity in 2019, the party has bagged both the Lok Sabha seats. It has also registered a comprehensive victory in the Mandalgarh assembly segment despite a party rebel garnering more than 20,000 votes.
It is safe to say that the last full budget by the BJP led government ahead of the 2019 General Elections didn’t bring anything special to the automobile industry. While there were huge expectations from the budget, ranging from ease in GST to relaxation for electric vehicles, there was no mention of the auto industry as such by Arun Jaitley in his whole speech. Budget 2018 was more misses than hits for the auto industry.
On reel
While the entire country had their hopes stitched to Finance Ministry Arun Jaitley's last full fledged budget before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the budget came as a dampener for the common man. Here's a rundown.