Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented her sixth Budget on February 1. This was the second interim budget presented by Sitharaman ahead of the general elections scheduled by May-June later this year. In less than an hour-long Budget speech, Ms. Sitharaman presented the Modi Govt\u2019s achievements in the last 10 years that transformed India from being a \u2018fragile\u2019 economy to the world\u2019s fastest-growing major economy. Not to let any opportunity slip by, the finance minister also assured or promised that the Modi government will be bringing out a white paper on the \u2018mis\u2019 deeds of the previous UPA government. Leaving aside the BJP\u2019s obsession with the perceived enemy, the Congress, the overkill has abnormally and unwarrantedly spilled over to the budget speech. Leaving aside the superficial interpretation of the budget as being focussed on youth and women empowerment and to check fiscal deficit by lowering the FY25 fiscal deficit to 5.1% of GDP, all in all, the budget was like a lull before the storm. Sitharaman did not announce anything significant in her interim budget but only to tide over the current financial requirements till July 2023 when she will be presenting her seventh and possibly most radical budget for 2024-25. In her around 58-minute speech, the finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said as much in her short speech quoting Prime Minister Narendra Modi, \u201cwe need to focus on four major castes. They are, \u2018Garib\u2019 (Poor), \u2018Mahilayen\u2019 (Women), \u2018Yuva\u2019 (Youth) and \u2018Annadata\u2019 (Farmer). On analysts about what is the roadmap that the finance minister wanted to project, the answer from the FM was clear: Nothing would change. Expenditure will be compressed in 2023-24, and no major giveaways for 2024-25 were announced. Expectations that the finance ministry would make use of higher-than-expected revenue receipts to pad expenditure did not materialise, and borrowing is projected to shrink in the coming year. Sitharaman repeated her commitment to the fiscal consolidation glide path that had previously been announced, which is supposed to take the fiscal deficit down to \u201cbelow 4.5 per cent\u201d of gross domestic product or GDP by 2025-26. As expected, opposition leaders have criticised Sitharaman\u2019s budget on several counts. Reacting to the conservative interim budget, Congress leader Manish Tewari, said the fiscal deficit was \u2018extremely worrying.\u2019 Explaining his worries over the budget, he pointed to the increasing fiscal deficit, \u201cbecause the numbers presented by the Finance Minister clearly demonstrate that over 18 lakh crore is the unfunded extent of the Union Budget for this year, and this number is only going to increase.\u201d Trinamool Congress leader Mamata Banerjee has said that the increasing unemployment and skyrocketing prices, will make Sitharaman\u2019s claims crumble like a house of cards. The party has questioned the basis on which the government projected robust revenues t fiscal deficit at 5.1%. because on the other hand, there has been no scaling back of capital expenditure. On the other hand, prime minister Narendra Modi has come out in full support of the budget presented by finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman. Modi said investment for capital expenditure was taken to a historic high of \u20b911,11,111 crore.The fact is that the interim budget makes no effort to do anything more than promote crony capitalism but Indians are more focussed on religious matters and that is perhaps the most unfortunate aspect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented her sixth Budget on February 1. This was the second interim budget presented by Sitharaman ahead of the general elections scheduled by May-June later this year. In less than an hour-long Budget speech, Ms. Sitharaman presented the Modi Govt\u2019s achievements in the last 10 years that transformed India from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[685],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-402855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-editorial"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402855","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=402855"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402855\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=402855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=402855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=402855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}