Indian Interim Budget for 2024-25, Key Points
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman rose to present the Interim Budget for 2024-25.
There were indications as to what its focus would be.
Doubts that this would be anything more than a vote-on-account had been settled.
An ‘interim Economic Survey’, innocuously titled “The Indian Economy: A Review”, has presented a survey of post-Independence economic development, with a periodisation that divides those years into the pre- and post-Modi government eras.
In language reflective of an electioneering pamphlet, peppered with the Prime Minister’s own assessments of his government’s record, the document concludes that the decade 2014-24 was one of “transformative growth”.
Periods of significant or even high episodes of growth prior to that transformative decade are identified as wanting, on the grounds that such growth either left structural challenges unaddressed or was the result of an unsustainable credit boom that damaged the banking sector.
Given this background, it was to be expected that the Budget speech would be a vocal expression of this eulogy of the two governments of the last 10 years.
For years, Part A of the Budget speech has been a tiresome recounting of policies already adopted, and to be adopted.
Many of which have little to do with the issues of resource mobilisation and allocation and the strategy they signal.
Which must be the actual concern.
That has been true of this year’s Interim Budget as well, which focused on all the “welfare” schemes, in areas varying from housing to food, which have been largely attributed to the Prime Minister.
With the Interim Budget being identified as a mere vote-on-account, Part B of the speech was a declaration that while pursuing consolidation in the sense of achieving periodically revised fiscal deficit to GDP ratios.
The government will be stepping up spending on infrastructure and welfare.
In the circumstances, what can be assessed from the detailed Budget documents is the fiscal performance of the Centre in the current (rather than next) financial year, 2023-24.
Even that exercise is fraught with difficulty because the practice of presenting Budgets on February 1 adopted in recent years has meant that “revised estimates” for the financial year incorporate projections relating to most of the last quarter of the financial year extending to March 31.
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