View: Recommitment to long-term approaches, with the right correctives & responses
Narendra Modi has been in office since 2014, this is the 11th successive budget of his tenure. There will be signs of continuity, as well as critics who will say that one measure or the other should have come much earlier rather than now. While all this is well-taken, the fact is, every budget — even if part of a continuum — also has its individual context. This context is both political and economic.
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As such, a budget is a recommitment to long-term approaches, as well as a corrective and a response to interrogative questions of the day. A good budget attempts to balance these twin imperatives. Using that metric, Nirmala Sitharaman should be congratulated for delivering a well-above-average budget.
Is it an ideal budget? Perhaps not. Yet, domestic conditions, including the message and verdict of the recent general election, as well as international turbulence — especially the rocky global trading environment and tepid demand in some of India's key export markets — have created obvious limitations.
Given this, what has Sitharaman set out to achieve? She has pushed for job creation and further incentivised — but in an intelligent, rather than reckless, manner — private investment. The capex cycle of Indian industry has not quite got going for several years now. Initially, this was due to legacy issues — the banking crisis — and then a series of international shocks,
