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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Once in a Century Budget: Statement of Fact or Hope? -Arun Kumar

-TheWire.in

The pandemic and lockdown threw existing budgetary calculus completely out of line. But that provides an opportunity too.

In December 2020, talking at a CII meet, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman reportedly stated: “100 years of India wouldn’t have seen a budget being made post-pandemic like this”.

Was it a mere statement of fact, that never before had parts of the budget-making process been done in a virtual manner after a pandemic, or a statement of hope – that the final result would indeed be a budget never before seen in a century?

It is almost a year since COVID-19 hit India and laid the economy low. The country has witnessed its sharpest fall in economic activity since the country began announcing GDP data. Even compared to most major economies in the world, the fall in India’s GDP was the steepest.

As a result, there is the crisis of unemployment, steep rise in demand for work under MGNREGS, decline in incomes due to loss of employment and cut in salaries of the employed, failure of businesses, rising financial distress and growing NPAs, rising disparities, steep fall in government revenues and correspondingly a sharp rise in the fiscal deficit in the budget. So, large sections of the population are hit hard.

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