Union Budget 2018: Highlights
* Have decided to take healthcare protection to a new aspirational level. Launching a flagship National Health Protection Scheme to cover 10 crore poor and vulnerable families, benefiting approximately 50 crore people
* Providing Rs 5 lakh per family per year for medical reimbursement, under National Health Protection Scheme. This will be world’s largest health protection scheme
* Government is slowly but steadily progressing towards universal health coverage
* Air pollution in Delhi NCR is a cause for concern; special scheme will be implemented to support Haryana, Punjab, UP and Delhi NCT to address this and subsidise machinery for management of crop residue
* Scheme for revitalising school infrastructure, with an allocation of Rs 1 lakh crore over four years. Called RISE – Revitalizing Infrastructure in School Education
* Eklavya schools to be started for Scheduled Tribe population
* By 2022, every block with more than 50 per cent ST population and at least 20,000 tribal people will have ‘Ekalavya’ school at par with Navodaya Vidyalas
* Integrated B.Ed programme to be initiated for teachers to improve quality of teachers
* India is firmly on path to achieve 8 per cent plus growth
* Propose to raise institutional credit for agriculture to Rs 11 lakh Crore for 2018-19
* Rs 14.34 lakh crore to be spent for rural infrastructure
* Eight crore free gas connections to women under UJJWALA and 4 crore electricity connections to the poor under Saubhagya Yojana
* Fishery and Aquaculture Infrastructure Development Fund and Animal Husbandry Infrastructure Fund to be set up with corpus of Rs 10,000 crore
* Restructured National Bamboo Mission to be launched with allocation of Rs 1,290 crore to promote sector in a holistic manner
* Rs 500 crore for Operation Green
* Agri-Market Development Fund with a corpus of 2000 crore to be set up for developing agricultural markets
* 470 APMCs have been connected to #eNAM network, the rest to be connected by March 2018
* Minimum Support Price of all crops shall be increased to at least 1.5 times that of the production cost
* From ease of doing business, government has moved to ease of living for the poor and middle class
* Allocation in for Ministry of Food Processing is being doubled; specialised agro-processing and financial institutions to be promoted by the government
* India now a $2.5 trillion economy and firmly on path to achieve 8% plus growth soon
* Will focus on agriculture and rural economy, health, infra, senior citizens
* Hope to grow at 7.2 per cent-7.5 per cent in the second half of 2017-18
* Allocating natural resources in a more transparent manner, there is a premium on honesty now
* Government led by PM Modi has implemented a series of fundamental structural reforms
IANS
