Budget 2013-14: Thumbs up from PM, thumbs down from opposition

mangaloretoday.com/ ITV

New Delhi, Feb 28: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has praised the union budget presented by finance minister P Chidambaram while the opposition parties and outside supporters  like SP and BSP have slammed it for being low in substance.
Hailing the budget, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today said it would reverse the pessimistic mood and lay the roadmap for investments as he expressed confidence of returning to eight per cent growth within three years.

Singh listed fiscal deficit, inflation and current account deficit as three barriers that can affect the realisation of the growth potential of the economy.

“Given the formidable challenges facing our economy, the Finance Minister has done a commendable job,” the Prime Minister said in an interview to Doordarshan soon after the presentation of the General Budget for 2013-14.

 

“The Finance Minister has taken important steps to reverse pessimistic mood with regard to investment climate, with regard to the growth potential and possibilities of our economy,” he said.

Singh said India needs to accelerate the tempo of growth to create jobs for its growing labour force to the extent of about 10 million persons every year.

“We need, as the 12th five year plan has mentioned eloquently, a growth rate of about eight per cent. This is a growth rate which is consistent with our underlying potential,” he said, adding it was a difficult task which cannot be achieved in a single year.

Singh said the Finance Minister has laid out a roadmap which has “plenty of food for every ministry to chew there”.

Expressing confidence that India could return to eight per cent growth within three years, Singh said all ministries needed to work together to convert the challenges identified by the Finance Minister into opportunities.

“It is up to the collective wisdom of my council of ministers to convert these challenges into opportunities to accelerate the tempo of growth, to make it more inclusive, to make it more sustainable,” Singh said.

Noting that the economic survey had pegged the growth rate between 6.2 and 6.7 per cent, Singh said “in three years’ time, if we work hard and the world economy also improves, we should get back to 8 per cent growth rate in two to three years time”.

He flagged three “barriers”—fiscal deficit, inflation and current account deficit—that can affect the realisation of the growth potential of the economy and said there was a need for a multi-pronged strategy to tackle these.

Admitting that inflation had gone “out of hand”, he said the budget has outlined the path to bring fiscal deficit under control which could help rein it.“The Finance Minister has charted a path to bring fiscal deficit under control. And if he succeeds in that course, I think he would have created a better climate for growth, better climate for investment and we would have also created a climate for lower latent levels of inflation that we have had in the last two years,” Singh said.


The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Thursday said the general budget was "verbose" and lacking in substance."The budget is verbose but on substance, extremely low," said leader of opposition in the Rajya Sabha Arun Jaitley.
"First put the economy in distress; then a helpless finance minister comes out with a budget in which he had very little elbow space," Jaitley said.

According to him, Finance Minister P. Chidambaram had "made cosmetic changes in different heads of taxation or different expenditure". He added that the minister had indulged in a "little bit of jugglery, by marginally increasing taxes in certain ministries and substantially reduces expenditure".

Jaitley said the budget contained little to offer a boost to agriculture or manufacturing sectors, which are vital for sustainable growth.