On Monday, the Fifteenth Finance Commission submitted its report with recommendations on the formula for sharing the divisible pool of tax revenues between the Centre and the States for the next five years to the President. The panel’s proposed fiscal road map, up to 2025-26, will only come into the public domain once it is tabled in Parliament, if not in the winter session, at least before the Union Budget for 2021-22 is presented. An action taken report would reveal the government’s acceptance or rejection of the panel’s prescriptions. When the Fourteenth Finance Commission recommended a sharp increase in their take-home cut from 32% to 42% of the divisible pool of revenues and the Centre accepted it, States had obvious cause to be upbeat. However, their actual shares of total taxes mopped up have turned out to be far lower as the Centre deployed more cesses and surcharges to garner additional revenues in recent years. GST dues to States could touch ₹7 lakh crore by 2022: 15th
- 4hrs
Multinational drug company Pfizer has announced promising results from its ongoing phase-3 trial of a potential COVID-19 vaccine. However, these early results, of the vaccine candidate being “90% protective” in the trial’s volunteers — nearly 40,000 are enrolled — is the only important detail that is public. Pfizer, which is using a vaccine candidate by German firm BioNTech, had disclosed in September that for a vaccine to be judged 60% effective, 164 volunteers would have to contract COVID-19. This includes both the vaccine and placebo groups. The claim of 90% is based on a sample of 94 volunteers but it is not known how many belonged to either group. It is also unclear if those who were eventually infected, manifested mild or moderate severity of disease. Though the results, according to Pfizer, were announced by an expert independent committee, they have not yet been announced by the standard procedure of a peer-reviewed journal. In short, there is still time to be reliably sure
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