Even for the standard of an interim budget, the finance minister Ms Nirmala Sitharaman introduced a budget that is devoid of any significant annulments and remained a model one for the future interim budgets.
Her budget speech of just more than an hour largely included both the elaboration of the achievement of the government and repeated vision statement.
At the same time, her disciplined and muted approach in an election year has profoundly resulted in fiscal consolidation and sound fiscal parameters in the budget. Supported by buoyant revenues and restrained expenditure, the budget rightly puts the government budget on the sound fiscal track that is shown by a fiscal deficit target of 5.1%.
Despite the moderatism, the budget largely missed an approach to the many pertaining problems that that the economy is facing in this transformation time. One such area is the bigger responsibility of green transition and on the education front, the skill and upgradation of higher education infrastructure and policy. On all these areas, at least a token approach would have placed government’s positive steps.
Though the budget can be rated as conventional, it still has shown the political confidence of the government that it can regain the power without a budget-oriented extravagance. In this context, the entire exercise has shown a mature approach to economy management at the administrative level. At the same time, this budget has left many works to be done during the full-time budget to be introduced in July, that is few months away from now.
