Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will address the media at 1 pm today.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will address the media today amid reports of an announcement of an economic bailout package to tide over the impact of coronavirus.
In her last press meet on Tuesday, Nirmala Sitharaman said: "The economic package is going to be announced soon."
The stimulus package, according to some reports, will be focused on micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) and daily wage workers besides injecting liquidity in the market.
The government has been in consultation with the Reserve bank of India, capital market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India.
News agency ANI, quoting a senior Finance Ministry official, said a task force has also been formed to give suggestions to the Finance Ministry and top officials are intensively working on the plan.
The Indian economy that had already slowed down before the outbreak of coronavirus, is in for a more difficult period in the coming months with businesses almost coming to a standstill. The finance ministry and the RBI have taken several steps to ensure that liquidity in the system remains intact. But Industry has called for more stimulus measures to fight depression like conditions setting in the economy.
On Tuesday, Ms Sitharaman announced a slew of measures ranging from extension of deadline for filing income tax returns to waiving cash withdrawal fee for using automatic teller machine (ATMs) of other banks and relaxing threshold for insolvency proceedings to Rs 1 crore.
To help small companies facing the threat of defaults due to coronavirus-related lockdown, the government raised the threshold that would trigger insolvency proceedings to Rs 1 crore from current Rs 1 lakh. This raising of the threshold will help small and medium enterprises, the Finance Minister said.