CBGA - Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability

Budget Track Volume 7, Track 1, October 2009

Foreword
This issue of Budget Track draws attention to government provisioning for some basic problems confronting the common people – concerns relating to food security and nutrition, livelihood security and adaptation to climate change.

Our piece on Budget and Policy Tracking is set at a time when the government is grappling with issues like the global economic downturn, drought, rising prices and food insecurity. For the first time, the piece tracks the major issues that were deliberated and discussed in Parliament in response to the Union Budget, and flags some important legislations that were introduced or have been passed such as the Right to Education Bill. It also assesses critical policy proposals such as the Unorganised Sector Workers’ Social Security Bill, the new Direct Tax Code 2009 and the Unique National Identity number/card (UID) project. A brief discussion on the mid-term
review of the Eleventh Five Year Plan is also made.

In the context of assessing the progress made in the Eleventh Plan commitments and as a pre-budget exercise, CBGA attempted estimation of the financial resource requirement of some of the programmes and schemes that cater to critical needs of the common people. The articles on Right to Food and Integrated Child Development Services discuss the key issues as well as outline what is needed in terms of finances if these critical entitlements are to be made available to the people. The piece on Climate Change traces the developments in the discourse on government policy stance on public provisioning for climate change. Unarguably, the most successful initiative of the UPA – the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) has improved livelihood security among rural households in the country. However, concerns with regard to the existing design and implementation of NREGS persist. The guest article by Dr. Mihir Shah throws light on this.

We do hope this issue would be useful in your advocacy efforts.