Clipped from: https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/what-the-economy-needed-from-this-years-budget-7761506/
Himanshu writes: Expenditure on social welfare, agriculture and rural infrastructure is the best strategy in an economy struggling with low demand and investment
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman leaves her office to present the Budget in Parliament in New Delhi, February 1, 2022. (Reuters Photo)
A day before the Union budget, two important documents were released on the state of the Indian economy. The first was the revised estimates of national accounts for 2020-21. According to these estimates, the economic growth rate slowed down from 8.3 per cent in 2016-17 to only 3.7 per cent in 2019-20, the year before the pandemic. The downward revision of the 2019-20 estimate implies that the slowdown in the economy was worse than what we knew. It is certainly a tribute to the smartness of the government to have brought down the growth rate of the economy to less than half of the level in 2016-17 in just three years when there were no droughts, no financial crisis, no external shocks or any other act of God! The second document was the Economic Survey which takes this smartness to next level by its analysis that the crisis in the economy is not a result of demand deficiency, but due to supply constraints, despite a plethora of evidence to the contrary even by the government’s own official statistics. Of course, the budget is a sheer genius with a blueprint for creating further misery for a majority of the population already battered by the “Great Indian Slowdown” followed by the pandemic.
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