While Union Budget 2024-25 emphasises urban infrastructure through initiatives like the Smart Cities Mission and AMRUT, questions arise about the inclusivity and holistic impact of these developments. This article attempts to examines the allocation and effectiveness of urban development funds and the broader implications for sustainable and inclusive growth.

The article examines the budgetary allocations, evaluating their impact on crucial WASH initiatives from a sustainability perspective. Highlighting and suggesting ways forward for various gaps around institutional capacities, access and quality of coverage, the authors stress the need for a strategic and comprehensive approach to ensure equitable and sustainable progress in WASH sector service provision, across India.

This article presents the issues in availing the benefits under PMMVY scheme in Bihar. The data from the MWCD and other sources show that at least half of the applications to avail the scheme are rejected and the benefits accessed by pregnant women are much lower in Bihar as compared to the national average.

This article looks into the budgetary priorities of the Interim Budget 2024-25 and its implications for the social sector spending in terms of re-prioritisation and reallocation of resources since FY 2018-19.

The article discusses the key fiscal developments in the Agriculture and Allied Sector and what should have ideally been the fiscal response to the particular issues? The article points out that towards an effective utilisation of budgetary allocation implementation challenges, especially the institutional, governance and systemic should be resolved by creating an enabled system to absorb funds and fully utilise the available funds.

India’s commitment towards achieving SDGs can be realised only if the interventions at the national level are complemented by the initiatives undertaken at the sub-national level. This article presents the case of Assam which has been a front runner to prepare SDG linked Outcome Budgets. This year, Assam has gone a step forward, in terms of aligning its departmental schemes/interventions under thematic areas to promote overall welfare and development in the State.

Our climate finance team members Soutrik and Subrata do an analytical analysis on how the interim budgets reflects the climate action priorities across Mitigation, Adaptation and Disaster Resilience.

Reflecting on the Union Budget Interim 2024-25 we analyze the current trends and allocations along with some key gaps towards India’s holistic climate action strategy. We look towards what can be some highlighting issues which can be looked into in the upcoming main budget and India’s forthcoming climate action strategy.

The article discusses how the Interim Union Budget for 2024-25 addresses Nutrition. It examines whether the budget gives adequate priority to this crucial sector, by having a closer look at some of the pertinent issues on the ground.

Direct Tax is a more equitable measure of income redistribution as it imposes a lesser burden on the economically disadvantaged compared to Indirect Taxes. The Direct Tax contribution to the Union Government’s revenue growth has been consistently increasing over the past few years. This article takes a deeper look into the shift in the composition of direct taxes and its projection for FY2025. It also examines the GST trends and the move towards centralisation of taxes through cess and surcharges.

The rural economy showed an extraordinary resilience to absorb the reverse migration shock caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, however, it is still confronted with glaring disparities due to high levels of poverty and socio-economic inequalities, which especially intensified after the pandemic. In this context, the present article examines the efficacy and effectiveness of the allocations made under the Interim Budget (2024-25) towards major flagship programmes such as MGNREGS, DAY-NRLM, PMAY-G and PMGSY to further strengthen the resilience of the rural economy in India.

The presents an analysis of the budgetary spending of different umbrella and core schemes and programmes targeting the social security of the unorganised sector workers to give readers a broad idea of the existing schemes and also about the change in allocation towards them in the last six years.