What we need is a universal old age pension scheme that provides a decent, minimum wage-linked monthly amount to all, excluding those already covered by other pension plans.

Daily meal preparations for the family continue to remain a woman’s task, across class, caste and region. Among other things, it leads to a crucial time poverty.

Despite a reduced majority, the tendency to posit every programme and intervention as the prime minister’s largesse towards the masses seems to be continuing.

Improvements in toilet access and bank accounts are easier to link to direct government schemes, but the first step towards an honest analysis of what worked and what didn’t would be reviving India’s data ecosystem through conducting the Census and consumption expenditure survey.

Presenting a budget, especially in the midst of an economic crisis, is an opportunity to communicate a government's vision for the country. This budget fails to do that and seems to be completely disconnected from ground realities.

Regular public spending on sectors such as health, education and social protection is amongst the lowest in India compared to other emerging economies.

Narendra Modi has taken a well-functioning but underfunded scheme and added his 'branding' to it. The least he could have done is allocated the kind of money the programme badly needs.

Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said that the budget outlay for health and wellbeing has increased 137%. But a closer look at the allocations shows a number of things not related to the Union budget on health.

The pandemic should be used as an opportunity to correct the structural deficiencies in the healthcare sector.

According to the data, in most states there is a worsening in nutrition indicators such as childhood stunting, wasting and underweight.

There is no sizeable increase for any of the schemes when it comes to allocations, while the continual wrecking of FCI's finances don't augur well for the future of PDS.

The budget does little for the most vulnerable populations such as women working in the informal sector or their young children.

While Piyush Goyal's and Narendra Modi's speeches hailed new investments for the poor and the unorganised sector workers, the numbers in the budget tell a different story.

This is the last full budget of the present government and the last opportunity for it to demonstrate its commitment to India's health and nutrition.

Conditionalities related to utilising health services do not make any sense in the absence of a service guarantee and only serve to blame the victims and not the system for its failures.