Neither Cruel Nor Kind:

March 17/2012: Guess I am a bit confused today. So would anyone else be, if they scratched the surface and looked a little below the top at this Annual Indian Budget Drama. To speak brutally, India has never had the good fortune to have a genuine economist guiding the basic principles of our policies and programs. The best  claim to fame in this sector are ex employees of certain international  banking agencies or at worst politicians with not much of a clean record in the past who, we assume, are capable of taking the hands of this growing country and leading it up the Hershey highway.

Mr Pranab Mukhrjee presented his first Budget, as far as I recollect, in the year 1982. Now, 30 years later, the media and the corporate sector of India are behaving as if the same man would be capable to spin some awesome surprises and twirl the head of this country that, we are told, would attract immense foreign (or read  private) investments just if some certain paragraphs are added or deleted from a booklet that a person reads in the Parliament while sipping from a tumbler full of water. The notion that something like the Viability Gap Funding (VGF) shall do the trick does not hold as much water as even that tumbler. Take for example the concept that approving guidelines for establishing joint venture companies by defence public sector undertakings in PPP mode would put an end to our search for armaments in the international market.

Let us accept one thing at a time. These ventures, even if they come up with genuine entrepreneurs and not cloak-and-dagger arms dealers (that India is so familiar with) posing as private companies, will not be replacing a Northrop, Lockheed or even a Dassault. So, what are we really talking about? This document also talks of prioritising agriculture as a continued process. Past years have shown that most revelations made in this sector have not sunk down to the ground level. Forget food security bill and revamping the public distribution system. These are massive tasks that need dedicated manpower to implement. The Food Corporation of India, an existing machinery, has not been successful in creating proper storage facilities. Nor has that body been able to implement a clear cut policy to safeguard the farmer from distress sales in a normal year; neither has it streamlined the procurement policy even after decades of working in that field.

The Budget wants to marginally cut tax percentages on agricultural inputs such as fertilizers on one hand and give the benefit of subsidy to farmers through the fertilizer retail sales machinery. So be it.There is passing mention about water 'stress' affecting agriculture (para 84) but no tangible investments are projected to ensure water bodies are protected/promoted. With the rising demand for fresh water from our urban centers and new industries, especially power plants, the nation has to start investing in holding back rain water in large quantities from going waste to the ocean if we do not wish to become desertified. Similarly, para 202 just brushes past the government's recognition of the potential of solar energy by saying it would exempt CVD from plant and machinery for the initial setting up of such projects without actually demonstrating a clean direction towards this huge alternative energy resource.

Offering Women's Self Help Groups (SHGs) a meagre amount of maximum 3 Lacs as loan with a crippling 7% interest rate shows the lack of touch with reality of whichever Babu drafted this Budget 2012-13. That there is no political vision behind this document is clear over and over again throughout its body. Mention of a few more ID cards such as the Resident Identity Cards, the Kisan Credit Cards and Aadhar cards and so on goes to show the way India replicates, and thereby confuses, by creating a plethora of the same things that eventually do not turn up as any help to either the common citizen or to the governance system. To make matters brief, this Budget 2012-13 is a lame exercise in futility. Somehow, I felt as if the Finance Minister did not have his soul and mind in what he was reading or what it may portend for the country in the coming year. Quoting the Prince of Denmark from Hamlet--I have to be cruel to be kind--explained his ambiguity about the whole affair. The game, it seems, has been lost somewhere down the line.