Long Talk, Short Take

The pluses and minuses of Nirmala Sitharaman’s budget qualify for an insoluble sum

- Lola Nayar and Jyotika Sood

She traversed several roads. She connected them through exits, and switch roads. But in the end, the economic highways that emerged from finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s Budget 2020 looked like a maze. Her speech came across as a policy construction with little idea of what to do, and when. Instead, what she achieved was a mish-mash with dozens of clogged pathways full of long jams. Possibly, the expectations among the investors and citizens were too high, and the financial shackles on Sitharaman too restrictive.

The huge hopes implied that the budget decisions were perceived largely as two-steps forward, one-and-a-half backwards. The FM doled out several benefits with her right hand, but took away sizeable portions with her left. Clearly, the constraints didn’t allow the FM to go all the way. In the process, her fiscal arithmetic looked a bit wobbly, as she based the government’s optimistic revenue estimates on the successful sale of family jewels, like the state-owned LIC and other cash-rich PSUs, and that of telecom spectrum.

As Sitharaman stuttered through what was the longest speech in free India—she took several water and medicine breaks and couldn’t finish the last two pages—it seemed as if she was unsure about what plagued the economy. She wasn’t clear whether the problem lay with the consumers’ inability, and lack of desire, to spend, or with India Inc’s helplessness to invest. Did she have to hike demand by putting more money in the buyers’ pockets, or spur supply by encouraging companies to enhance their production?