She has shown shrewdness, sensitivity, and courage.
All of these will be needed in ample quantities for the real challenge that will emerge after the elections, notes Shreekant Sambrani.
What are the main concerns of healthy young people, comfortable with reasonably well-paying occupations?
Most likely, acquiring a residence with affordable conveniences, providing for children's education, and dreaming about even better prospects.
Doctors, illnesses, and insurance are quite removed from their decision matrices.
India in 2024 is placed in a similar situation, enjoying reasonably good and stable economic prospects, making the most of its present good fortune, and aspiring to be a global superpower at some unspecified date in the not too distant a future.
Optimism and confidence are the two defining traits of the national mood.
The country's economic ship seems to be sailing smoothly, despite the all too looming presence of the Scylla of lack of 'good' jobs and the Charybdis of rising prices of essentials.
This was amply reflected in Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman's 'Budget' speech on 1 February 2024.
We had been warned for past some weeks not to expect any dramatic announcements, but we didn't quite believe it, since we thought, surely there would be at least some token giveaways, in view of the general election just weeks away.
Well, there weren't any, except a tiny and symbolic one (see below), and we heard a Budget speech that didn't quite last an hour, did not contain any citations from shayars or philosophers, the only quotes being those from the prime minister, there were no interruptions, and the parliamentary formalities of presenting the Budget were dealt with in less time than taken by train arrival announcements at busy railway junctions!
All really unheard of in Indian annals of Budget presentations.
I had observed in connection with the 2017-18 Budget, 'The Big News about the Budget for 2017-18 that Mr Arun Jaitley presented in Parliament on 1 February is that there is no Big News,' and added that 'This is at should be in normal times.'
And by common consent, the present is as close to normal times for India as can be.
So it should come as no surprise that Ms Sitharaman gave short shrift to Part B of the Budget, which deals with proposals for new taxations or modifications to the existing ones.
She did that in just one sentence: No changes in direct or indirect taxation or customs duties.
The one tiny modification she announced was to extend for one year the concessions and exemptions scheduled to expire on 31 March 2024.
The government expects to further rev up the engine of growth that it believes has done well so far, public capital expenditure.
It is provided at Rs 11.1 trillion, twice as much as was proposed in 2022-2023.
This big leap has been made possible not by recourse to deficit financing (printing money in common parlance) but by an increased revenue buoyancy, largely because of a bigger tax base and better compliance, in turn caused by simplification of processes.
Hence, Ms Sitharaman has not only shaved a decimal point off the fiscal deficit target for the current year (5.9 per cent of the GDP) but is also confident to further lower it to 5.1 per cent for 2024-2025.
Defence spending is set to be over Rs 6 trillion, the largest departmental allocation.
Quite clearly, that leaves little room for any increases in other allocations.
Despite her economy of time with Part B, Ms Sitharaman still spoke for the better part of an hour.
She used most of it to establish bragging rights for the decade of the NDA rule.
She said that some 250 million had moved out of multi-dimensional poverty, average incomes had increased by 50 per cent, inflation was generally below 5 per cent.
She drove the point home by selectively juxtaposing this record against that of the previous decade, that of the UPA regime.
Clearly, this was the pre-election part of the Budget speech, and not additional sops, which weren't there.
This column will not summarise most of them, as we will get to hear of them until boredom come in the next few weeks.
Suffice it to say that despite expected criticism from the opposition, there is much that cannot be contested in the finance minister's claims.
The Budget dutifully referred to the four main pillars (or castes, take your pick) coined by Mr Modi: The poor, the women, the youth and the farmers.
Ms Sitharaman counted specific gains already achieved by the four groups and assured us that there would more support for them in the main Budget as also in the near future.
An interesting sidelight was the claim that as Rs 34 trillion worth of benefits were transferred directly by the government, that process generated savings of Rs 1.7 trillion for the government.
At 5 per cent of the amount transferred, this is no small sum.
This is also in line with our everyday experience of money savings caused by digital transactions, not to mention the convenience and saving of time.
No wonder Mr Modi was singing praises of such digital transactions to Mr Emmanuel Macron, when the French president was in India last week!
Ms Sitharaman's speech was replete with alliterative phrases and acronyms that seem to be the hallmark of the present regime: Reform, perform, transform (incidentally, even President Droupadi Murmu used it in her address to the joint session of Parliament on 31 January); democracy, demography, and diversity were just two among the many she used.
An interesting one this writer had not heard before was governance, development, performance (GDP, get it?) No prizes offered for guessing whose coinages they are!
A somewhat jarring note was repeated in the speech. It talked of vikasit Bharat (developed India) by 2047 and saw no contradiction with it in its claim that free rations will continue to be provided for 800 million Indians for the coming five years at a cost of over Rs 11 trillion.
That may be good electioneering, but what kind of a wannabe economic superpower claims it a success that 57 percent of its population cannot afford to pay for the most basic requirement of life, food? How do we reconcile doles with aspirations?
That brings us to the real issue: How do we manage to get the developed status by 2047?
Calculators will tell us that if we grow at a compounded annual rate of 8 per cent over the next two decades and then some, we will attain that Holy Grail as defined by the United Nations.
But that begs the question, how do we get that growth?
With all our huffing and puffing, we have managed 7 per cent, but 8 per cent would not be possible without the third growth engine of exports seriously kicking in.
Granted, the Interim Budget (or more correctly, the vote on account) is not the place to address this question, but since the finance minister, and more importantly, her boss, sound confident of coming back with a proper Budget after the elections, they must squarely state their strategy in that Budget.
And then we will not be able to rely on our (premature, perhaps) triumphalism of having prevailed in an uncertain and troubled world -- we need it to achieve what we may believe as our manifest destiny.
The present global environment does not hold very encouraging prospects for the emergence of a second China.
This is not to belittle the real achievements of Ms Sitharaman.
She showed great courage in cleaning up government accounts and not taking recourse to off-budget hiding of borrowings.
She has stuck to her guns on the GST issue and seen it to safety.
She has been stern with the states' profligate spending.
If the Sensex was behaving like a normal day on 1 February 2024, a large part of the credit must go to her.
She has shown shrewdness, sensitivity, and courage. All of these will be needed in ample quantities for the real challenge that will emerge after the elections.
On a personal note, I am enormously grateful to Ms Sitharaman's stress on preventive vaccinations of girls in the age group 9 to 14 against cervical cancer.
That could make a tiny but most welcome dent in the realm of the Emperor of All Maladies.
Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff.com
