 Hello and welcome to another episode of the Daily Roundup. I am Aditi and today we are going to be presenting some of the latest and most important stories that we report about here at NewsClick. Acting Finance Minister Piyush Goyal presented the interim union budget for 2019-20 on Friday. The budget was especially significant as it came just over two months before the general election that will determine the future of the Narendra Modi government. Goyal's budget speech was clearly made speaking the elections in mind. The speech involved a lot of narration of the Modi government's schemes and claims about its achievements. It was widely speculated that the government might would declare farm loan waivers, new welfare schemes and tax ops to voodoo voters. What the budget papers reveal, however, is an attack on a range of welfare schemes especially those directed at Dalits, Adivasis, minorities and farmers. One of the announcements was a Rs 500 per month income supplement for farmers having less than two hectares. This is unlikely to help Modi and his party, the BJP, in the elections because it doesn't give much to the suffering farmer. The Manrega scheme was allocated just Rs 60,000 crore compared with the Rs 61,000 crore spent in the current year. This cut is not understandable because in the current year, spending had shot up considerably. Yet the government continues to cut funds for the only scheme that provides some relief to people suffering from unemployment and farm crisis. Among other announcements was a full tax rebate announced for individual taxpayers with income up to Rs 500,000 per year which is likely to take effect only next year after the newly elected Lok Sabha passes the budget. Most importantly, there was no major announcement on jobs despite the massive employment crisis. It is worth recalling that the youth were a major component of Modi's vote bank in 2014. Yesterday, Nite Aayog vice chairman held a damage control press conference to clarify the government's position on the thwarted NSSO report that has pegged the unemployment rate at 6.1% of four decade high. The thwarted NSSO report that has left the Modi government red-faced in the first assessment of the unemployment situation in the country after demonetization in November 2016. The report was one of the reasons that led to the resignation of two key members of the National Statistics Commission who said they were forced to do so as the government was not releasing the jobs. However, Nite Aayog vice chancellor claimed that the NSSO report was not final as the government had not approved it yet. Recall that earlier too, the Narendra Modi government which had promised to generate two crore jobs a year had even stalled the quarterly employment survey done by the Labour Bureau, Shimla, on the plea that the data only pertained to eight sectors. In international news, Doctors Without Borders, an international medical charity organization, recently published a report describing and highlighting the brutal and complex nature of injuries suffered by those injured in the Gaza border protests on the Gaza-Israel border. The organization chronicled extreme difficulties it faces in treating these injury victims. Most of the injured were shot by Israeli soldiers using live ammunition and lethal bullets. According to the report, a total of 6,174 Palestinians suffered injuries from the lethal bullets fired by the Israeli army since March 30, 2018 when the Palestinian Great March of Return protests began. Almost 90% of the injuries were to the lower limbs. Currently, 900 of those patients are under the medical care of MSF. The report also cites the unavailability of resources for sufficient treatment in Gaza, which makes it harder for the doctors to treat the wounded properly. It stresses that specialized treatment for these kinds of injuries is very hard to obtain in Gaza, which has been under an illegal and brutal Israeli land, air and sea blockade for more than 12 years. The patients have to be inevitably referred to hospitals outside Gaza. However, the report states that arranging the medical travel for patients involves acquiring necessary permission for several Israeli authorities and that in most cases these permissions are denied. Thank you for watching NewsClick. Please visit our website to know more about these and several other stories on www.newsclick.in. Subscribe to our YouTube channel and follow us on Facebook.