A Budget that goes nowhere -C Rammanohar Reddy

Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman is mistaken if she thinks her first Budget is going to revive a slowing economy.

The economy grew by just 5.8% in real terms in the last quarter of 2018-19. Yet, the Union Budget for 2019-20 assumes that the economy will grow this year by 12% in nominal terms, or by 7-8% in real terms. How can that dramatic a turnaround take place? Only if there is a sharp pick-up in investment — private and/or public.

There is little in the Budget that is likely to boost domestic private investment. There are neither any incentives for private investment nor support for public investment. To make matters worse, the Budget has actually projected a decline in central government capital expenditure (public investment) in 2019-20 by 6% in nominal terms. This is perhaps the first ever decline in public investment in the past half century, which, once adjusted for inflation, could measure over 10%. It is no wonder that the Finance Minister, shedding the convention of decades, did not mention any allocations for schemes in her speech and pushed all the numbers to the fine print.

Same direction as before

It would seem that since the government is unable to catalyse domestic investment or fund public investment, it is now turning abroad to fuel growth. Some of the norms for foreign institutional investment (FII) are to be liberalised, so too for foreign portfolio investment (FPI) and ceilings on foreign direct investment (FDI) are to be raised in some sectors. More ominously, the government has now decided to go in for external commercial borrowings to meet part of its borrowing requirements, claiming that India’s external debt to GDP ratio is very small. This is very much like what the governments of the 1980s did, which eventually led to the balance of payments crisis of the early 1990s. Why are we again heading in that direction?

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