'For whom are the budgets presented?'
Saravanan, 28, runs a provision store in Chennai. He has never been interested in the presentation of the budget "which is done routinely every year without doing any good for the common man."
But he is sure about one thing: no budget and no political party have done anything good for rural India.
Till he came to Chennai from Ernakulam in Kerala, he was not aware of the wide disparity between urban and rural India.
"In Kerala, there is not much difference between cities, towns and villages. They look almost the same. Every village has schools, colleges, hospitals, good roads and excellent transport facilities. But when I reached here, I understood that the cities are huge and have lots of money. If you go to a village, you see that there is nothing there; people live in an altogether different world. I feel the central government when planning a budget should follow what is done in Kerala and develop villages," he says.
What is the point in talking about liberalisation, when villages in India live in the dark ages? he asks. "I know people have a lot of money in the cities because I see the way they spend. The young working class goes for the top brand of everything without even bothering about the cost. Only the elderly look at the price tag. I also see a tremendous rise in the sales of cosmetics in the last few years. They buy only the costly imported brands and not the cheap Indian ones." He talks from his experience of running a store.
If he were the finance minister, Saravanan says he would stop all the development in the cities and do something for rural India. "I think let the cities be like this. India is not cities alone. I will see to it that good roads are built in every village, and that it has good schools, colleges and hospitals. If you cannot develop India as a whole, what is the point in presenting budgets year after year? For whom do these finance ministers present the budgets?" he asks.
-- Shobha Warrier
Photograph: Sreeram Selvaraj
Budget 2004-05: Complete Coverage
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