Interim Budget 2024: It Makes An Impressive Effort On A Key Front

Its highlight is its proposed path of fiscal consolidation towards the government's deficit target of 4.5%-of-GDP by 2025-26

- INDIRA RAJARAMAN

The interim budget seeks a vote on account through an appropriation bill, to authorize expenditures until a new government takes over after the general election in the first quarter of the next fiscal year 2024-25 (FY25).

The interim budget was bound by the spirit, if not the letter, of the model Code of Conduct of the Election Commission, which forbids any policy measure that could influence the election outcome, among them “financial grants in any form or promises thereof." The letter of the law applies only after the election is notified, which cannot be earlier than three weeks prior to the first date (if multi-phase) of the election.

Thus, the code was not formally violated when the 2019 interim budget for FY20 introduced a new PM Kisan Scheme, giving farm households owning less than 2 hectares of land an annual payout of ₹6,000 in three equal instalments, retrospectively from 1 December 2018. Contrary to expectations, the payout was not enhanced this time. The budget speech referred to 118 million beneficiaries, although the expenditure figures suggest 100 million. Whatever, that is still a wide base, over which the scheme remains wildly popular owing largely to the promptness of payments every four months.