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Fissures and rumblings within the ruling AIADMK may have been overcome for the present at any rate with a planned change-over in leadership, from Mr O. Panneerselvam to 'Chinamma' Ms. V.K Sasikala (62), highly preferred for her close association with late 'Amma' Jayalalithaa. She is already the General Secretary of the Party and has taken full control of the Party.

LUCKNOW: Samajwadi Party alliance with Congress is a major setback for BJP which was expecting reap harvest from split in Yadav family and possible split in Samajwadi Party.

The truth is hidden behind numbers. The union government’s 2017-18 budget has little to offer to push the country’s economic growth and human happiness. The year-end demonetisation seems to have choked the government’s expenditure estimates in the coming financial year. A modest seven to eight per cent retail price inflation, which looks natural once the current currency shortage in the market disappears and the money supply with the public grows to become normal, may actually contract the government spending on development during the next fiscal. The 2017-18 budget expenditure is far below the expectation and requirement for a 7.5 to eight per cent economic growth. At best, it is a shoe string budget that merely seeks to meet the minimum expenditure projections of various ministries of the government through the current difficult times. In sectors such as healthcare, despite an additional allocation of Rs. 10,000 crore, the expenditure as percentage of the country’s GDP comes down from this year’s level. There is no need to read much into the ten key steps the government professed in the budget for 2017-18 to push the country’s output growth in agriculture, infrastructure, MSME sector, manufacturing and export. The budget will help these sectors little. It will also contribute little towards higher employment generation and creation of more individual income to generate demand and growth.

Spurious drugs are life threatening and not life saving. Menace of spurious drugs has spread like wild fire in the country. According to a World Health Organisation (WHO) report, 35 per cent of world’s spurious drugs are produced in India followed by Nigeria (23 per cent). It’s fallout is devastating on health of the common man. Simultaneously, reusage of drugs that are expired and tendency to rope in cheaper substitutes of certain drugs are malpractices going up at a fast pace. As per current estimates, market shares of spurious drugs are 20 per cent of total drug market of about Rs.5000 crore in India. Exporting such medicines is spreading menace further. Added to this, hospitals and pharmacy companies charge exorbitant price from their principal clients for trials on poor patients being subjected to high risk therapies resulting in severe side effects. Hospitals also claim tax benefits for such services.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: It is the same old story for Kerala as far as the Union Budget is concerned. There is absolutely no change in the script as the Budget has once again given the state the cold shoulder, exacerbating the state’s sense of neglect and ratcheting up resentment.

With Congress-Samajwadi Party alliance having been firmed up, slogans are heard; Priyanka Lao, desh bachao. Leaders of the alliance feel that being a vote catcher, there will be windfall of votes for the Congress and SP, if she actively campaigns. Congress excitement has now spiked after top leaders publicly stated that Priyanka played a direct role in cementing Congress’s alliance with SP. Reportedly she was also mainly responsible for drafting Navjit Singh Sidhu into party’s Punjab unit. Alliance leaders feel that Priynaka is a brahmastra who would perform miracle for them.

His detractors had ridiculed and despised him and also written him off from the electoral politics of Uttar Pradesh forever, but the patriarch of the Samajwadi Party showed to the political establishment of India that he is the master political strategist and none can match his skill. The political class and the establishment were wrong in his assessment of Mulayam from the beginning. It took seriously the family feud between Mulayam and Akhilesh and perceived it as the end of the dominance of Yadav clan in Uttar Pradesh. The naivety of the political class to comprehend the correct ground realities was also manifest in its inability to decode the crisis as a friendly fight (noorakusti).

Having led a colorful past in which the Indian Railways (IR) was presenting its own budget every year since Independence and even prior to it as a colonial legacy, the Modi Government in its characteristic Schumpeterian creative destruction ended this practice this year by subsuming it in the General Budget. While nobody was bemoaning the loss of this practice, leave aside the army of employees of the IR, one expected some soothing steps to prepare the dedicated staff to this wrenching change by some grandstanding gestures on the part of the Centre to rev up the system.

In the wake of an impulsive but damaging hit on the economy and masses through abrupt demonetisation, whatever its sugary objectives, a helpless Finance Minister Mr Arun Jaitley has tried to do a cover-up operation through his Budget for 2017/18. In the result, there is little promise of a growth spurt or private investment revival of an order needed to create jobs, in the penultimate year of the Modi Government’s five-year term.

These is a proverb that when America sneezes, world catches cold. Now, when President Donald Trump sings hosannas to America First and Buy America and Hire Americans, China shivers on growth. China is an export oriented economy and USA is the prime engine for China’s growth. Chinese fears surfaced when President Xi Jinping ranted in World Economic Forum at Davos “The point I want to make is that many of the problems troubling the world are not caused by economic globalization”.