The focus of the budget — this year as well as budgets presented by the NDA government in general — is on 2047, the deadline for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of a developed India (Viksit Bharat), finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman explained in an interview on Saturday.
It will not be possible to achieve this by just adopting a narrow sectoral approach, she added. The emphasis needs to be on all sectors, and on everyone, Sitharaman said. On Thursday, she presented an interim budget that continued her government’s focus on capital expenditure (11% growth on a number that has already trebled in four years), listed its achievements on various fronts and its measures aimed at helping key constituencies (such as women and young people), exceeded its fiscal deficit target, and refrained from launching any populist schemes aimed at the summer’s general election. It was a move that many analysts said reflected the government’s confidence that it would return to power.
Referring to the interim budget’s statement about her government presenting a road map for Viksit Bharat along with the year’s budget in July, the finance minister said the budget too would focus on the “caste groups” she mentioned: the poor, women, the young, and farmers.
Sitharaman spoke of the structural changes in the rural economy, the process of building big banks, and the need to have a larger conversation on whether the targets of the fiscal responsibility act, drafted in another era, were practical — but she kept returning to 2047 even as she reiterated her government’s achievements over the past 10 years and referred to the lost decade between 2004 and 2014 when the UPA was in power.
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