budget

This is an extremely important week for India. A new session in Parliament has begun appropriately titled the Budget session. On the 26^th of this month,the end of the working week, Pranab Mukherjee, India’s Finance Minister will present the Union Budget. Two days earlier on the 24^th,Mamata Banerjee will present the Railway Budget.

So here at The India Street,we’re gearing up for a pretty busy week. We will be bringing reviews of both Budgets right here. With less than a week to go what exactly does this Union Budget intend to achieve?

When we reviewed the fiscal Budget in July 09, we weren’t too impressed with it. It was a lopsided almost boring and very stagnant Budget. Not high on ideas and very little reform.

This article isn’t a wish list of what we’d want to see in the Budget. The Finance Ministry is all about balancing politics with economics and almost always we see politics win even if it’s at the cost of sound economic decisions.

Pranab Mukherjee’s first full scale fiscal budget after twenty five years has been a classic case of trying to balance expectations just as well as numbers. The pressure on the Finance Minister has been considerable since he presented a very droll interim budget in the previous government. Mr. Mukherjee knows that he can’t please everybody and this budget has shown that he has tried not to but he’s done a reasonable enough job to stick to his stand. Not everyone is happy and not everyone is sad after the budget.

In what has been his last budget as the Railways Minister in the incumbent government, Lalu Prasad Yadav has presented an Interim Rail Budget characterized by the realities of the economy and the political sphere. It’s been a finely balanced act that’s been aimed at pleasing everyone. The Rail Budget for 2009 will in future hardly be remembered for the provisions it contains. Rather it will be remembered as what could be the last budget presented by a man with a very colorful personality and more importantly the man who has triumphantly turned around the financial fortunes of the Indian Railways.

The New Year for the Indian economy is an uncertain one. The highs that the markets reached a year ago have inadvertently led to the lows that it finds itself in. The euphoria from the Bull Run that lasted for four years has been wiped away in a matter of twelve months and has given birth to a Bear Market not seen in over half a century. For the Finance Department, getting the economy on track remains priority number one. In one sense it’s a good thing that India has not crept into a recession but the fact does remain that the magical growth rate of 9% will somehow not be that easy to achieve.

By Vipin Agnihotri

Indian Finance Minister P Chidambaram will present this year budget on February 29. The India Street wants to give you some exclusive information regarding the budget.

First and foremost, I am quite sure that income tax payers will get huge relief in the Budget. This is because of the simple reason that government is preparing itself to convince the middle class in the election year.