SINCE Piyush Goyal tabled the interim budget before parliament earlier this year (February 1, 2019), the Lok Sabha elections giving the Modi government an almost certain additional five years in office is not the only development. In addition to the reality of deepening agrarian distress and grim employment situation that were known even then, at least three other mutually related hard facts relevant to the finalisation of the budget for 2019-20 have also become known since, being acknowledged even by the Economic Survey.

THE process of filing nomination papers for the three tier panchayat elections in Tripura concluded on July 8 with widespread incidents of violence. The state election commission here, as was apprehended in an earlier column, completely failed to provide security and an atmosphere of free and fair election to the opposition. 

The figures of candidates from different political parties themselves are proof enough to show how the opposition has been barred from taking part in the election. 

FOUR organisations, (Adivasi Adhikar Rashtriya Manch, Akhil Bharatiya Adivasi Mahasabha, Campaign for Survival and Dignity and Bharat Jan Andolan) with lakhs of members from adivasi communities have written a letter to Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India, seeking his intervention to stop the attacks on tribals and forest dwellers by the central government. Below we reproduce the letter:

ONE of the most startling aspects of Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s speech is that it did not provide the numbers that are the basic reason for having a budget speech in the first place: the numbers relating to overall revenues and expenditure of the government, either for the previous year or for the current year. This was widely commented on, and the FM’s response was that all these numbers are available in the supplementary material provided in the budget documents, so there is no need to go into them in the speech.

“KERALA healthiest state, Bihar worst’, this is how TOI has reported the NITI Aayog’s latest health index released on of June 25. The report covers the period of 2015 to 2016 and 2017 to 2018. According to the news’ the report prepared by the NITI Aayog in collaboration with the health ministry and the technical assistance from the World Bank, it has studied the comparative performances of different categories of states, larger, smaller and union territories.