1.   The profits and cash balance of corporate companies sharply improved following last year’s budget, but there was very little to show on the investment front. For four successive months, the core industrial sectors continued to shrink. Saturday’s budget speech chose to hide this, notes TM Thomas Issac in Indian Express. 
  2. What does the new “optional” income tax slabs mean for taxpayers? And what does it mean for the government? Rohan Venkat explains in Scroll.in. 
  3. Also in Scroll.in, Mohan Guruswamy argues that the budget was long on rhetoric and short on substance. With lower tax collections and a shrinking government coffers, does the government have the money to boost the economy? 
  4. It was clear from the last year’s budget that the government was making unrealistic claims about revenue projections. Saturday’s budget speech has confirmed this fear, writes Nitin Desai in Business Standard. 
  5.  Describing the budget an exercise bereft of macroeconomic vision, economist CP Chandrasekar writes in The Hindu that the government has been unable to raise its spending at a time when circumstances demand a proactive fiscal policy. 
  6.   Despite the many signs that the finance minister was caught between a rock and a hard place in making her fiscal ends meet while framing Budget 2020-’21, expectations were running high. As it turned out, there are no booster shots for the economy in the Budget, only small infusions for targeted beneficiaries, says Aarti Krishnan in Business Line. 
  7. The United Kingdom left the European Union on Friday after years of acrimonious negotiations both within the country and with Europe. But what does this mean for those who wanted to remain in the EU fold? Timothy Garton Ash in Guardian has some suggestions. 
  8. What does it mean to be a quiz-obsessed youngster in India and the United States? What does it take to crack quizzes and what do these competitions teach us? In this long essay in the  Guardian, Samanth Subramanian recalls his quizzing days. 
  9. Europe observed the 75th anniversary of the Jewish Holocaust last month. In Longreads, a Polish artist invites a journalist to dig into disturbing remnants from the Holocaust that Poland would rather keep buried. 
  10.   The 195 Americans who flew from China to California were first told they must clear medical tests for Coronavirus that could take 72 hours or many days. Now they are all being quarantined for two weeks. One evacuee tried to flee. Miriam Jordan reports for New York Times.