pranab mukherjee

In July when Pranab Mukherjee presented the First Union Budget Of the 2^nd UPA government, a roadmap for the long term growth of India seemed to be emerging. Today’s Budget is a further continuation of this. I did not see any hardcore reforms and from my pre-Budget expectations its clear this is no surprise. Conservative as hell, this Budget reeks with the nature of the man who read it out in Parliament today.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it’s a bad Budget, it’s a pretty decent Budget but an opportunity lost to accelerate India’s growth furthermore. More could and should have been done. Still trying to push India into a double digit growth rate is an earnest effort.

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.

Rising prices in India have always been the ‘run to’ issue for any political group.It favors everyone except the government. This of course leaving aside the average Indian who has to spend more.Now that it’s Food Prices which are going through the roof, the usual round of chatter has begun. Opposition parties accusing the incumbent government of lackluster action, ineffectiveness and the usual lingo that anyone in India is used to especially when it’s a battle between political parties. None of the rhetoric in any case means squat if prices do not come down. We’ve been harping on rising prices for over a year now, I sincerely hope that this is not the case a year later as well.

The joke doing the rounds since yesterday is quite cheeky! It goes “Du-bai or not Du-bai that is the question”. Ha! Quite tongue in cheekish but appropriate all the same. When the markets open this week that’s the first question that traders and investors the world over have to answer. In a previous article posted this month titled ‘Signs Of A Correction’ , I remember ending that post with these words and I quote straight from the article “A correction around this time is likely to be a drawn out one. Price wise and time wise unless of course some big event casts its shadow and spooks the market leading to a tremendous fall.”

The events related to Dubai and the news that comes out of there this week has the potential to be that ‘Big event which spooks the market’. It’s something that can shift the Indian market from the current bullish gear to a selling, fear driven frenzy.

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.

Pranab Mukherjee’s recent appointment as India’s new Finance Minister has received a widespread ‘Thumbs Up’ from corporate to middle class India alike. The new Finance Minister’s priority will also be towards bringing in social reform which was extensively promised in his Congress Party’s election manifesto. The 74 year old clearly has his work cut out for him. He takes over a Finance Ministry that has been dealing without a leader for quite some time. In this article we take a look at the key areas the new Finance Ministry needs to deal with.

For Pranab Mukherjee who stepped into the shoes of the Finance Minister at the last minute, the Interim Budget has been a case of managing expectations just as much as it’s been a case of managing financial numbers. Compounded by the fact that India finds itself in the midst of a global economic crisis that has inevitably led most of the world into recession, the expectations from this budget being an interim one were pretty contained.True to this sentiment Pranab Mukherjee has presented an extremely flat budget.