POLL RUSH? Passing over pertinent concerns

After extolling the virtues of the interim budget, let us focus on the issues that commoners and discerning critics alike wish should have been addressed. While the entire pitch of the budget is about realising Viksit Bharat in 2047, a pertinent question arises about solutions, redressals, vision and outlays to cure the nation of various ills such as raging food inflation, spiralling unemployment, rural distress, etc. Hence, the opposition’s criticism of the budget as being ‘futuristic.’

This is not to belittle Sitharaman’s well-focussed efforts on fiscal health consolidation and talking points for elections, though. She has earned solid points for speaking on fostering growth, reducing borrowings, facilitating development through higher capital spend, giving space for private sector – by cutting back on gross borrowings by as much as 8 per cent to Rs 14.1 lakh crore – improving productivity, and creating opportunities. When she vowed to turn a few states into growth engines, we deduce that it would lead to overall progress in economic and social spheres. She made a forceful case for the Centre to pay utmost attention to the eastern region including states of Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, and West Bengal - a must if India is to emerge a developed country by 2047.

However, a mention and clear measures or poverty, farm distress, despondency among youth, gender-based injustice/backwardness would have made it a balanced speech, the opposition and the critics rightly contend. Interim budget speech did mention women, youth, farmers, and the poor as four key demographics and government’s outreach to them. Let’s examine.

Sitharaman said a high-powered committee would address the challenges arising from “fast population growth and demographic changes.” Where is the data to back it up? There is no Economic Survey either. Centre keeps pushing back the decennial Census of 2021. In the last 150 years, India’s decennial population census had never been delayed. Add to it is the fall in country’s fertility rate below replacement level i.e., the amount of fertility needed to keep the population the same from generation to generation. The FM said 25 crore people got freedom from multi-dimensional poverty in the last 10 years. Is there any faster decline in poverty in the last 9 years than during the earlier Congress regime? What about the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic? Both the national census and the consumption expenditure survey are more than a decade old. In the case of poverty, India has fallen six positions on the 2022 Global Hunger Index (GHI), ranking 107th out of 121 countries.

Again, India’s 19.3% rate of child wasting – as when a child is too thin for his or her height for the 2017-2021 is “the highest of any country in the world and drives up [South Asia’s] average owing to India’s large population,” a WHO report says. Recently, Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy said India’s unemployment rate rose to a two-year high of 10.09% in October. In the case of women, though there is an uptick in parity in wages and income and political empowerment, India still lags at 127th rank in terms of overall gender parity on the Global Gender Gap Index. And, as for the farmers distress, it is serious, if not grave. There are 154 farmers and daily-wage labourers’ suicides in India daily, as per the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) 2022 annual report. It was 144 in 2021. If there is any moral indignation in the society, leave alone protests, the governments – Centre and States – would respond and Budget Speeches would reflect them.