 "Medical staff members of a government-run medical college collect swabs from people to test for Covid-19 at a newly installed walk-in sample kiosk in Kerala's Ernakulam Photo: Reuters")
The Centre has begun to cut expenditure in right earnest as the financial impact of Covid-19 deepens.
Days after cutting the salaries and other allowances of MPs and ministers, the government has passed instructions to all departments to reduce their expenditure by as much as 60 per cent from their first-quarter spending plans.
Each department has to make the “savage cuts” by redoing the Budget maths.
The only exception is spending that deals with schemes related to the pandemic. Here too, there could be cuts for non-essential stuff. No instructions have been issued to states to prune expenditure but it
