Eight years ago, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi was pitching for the job, he talked about crores of new jobs every year to provide new opportunities to India’s youth. Eight years later, the government simply fails to acknowledge the elephant in the room- India’s massive unemployment problem.As India struggles with the lack of policy direction, Budget 2022-23 was another non-event that fails to solve our pressing problems that we face as a nation. The budget offers little hope on employment and even less on inflation and rising costs of living. There were no rebates in Income Tax rates or in Excise Rates for petroleum products. It was clear that the Finance Minister’s 90-minute speech was little more than an annual ritual which brought little hope.As details emerge, there are serious concern over possible cuts in food and fertilizer subsidies and cuts in other sectors which concern people directly. Early data indicates that Food Subsidy to Food Corporation of India under National Food Security Act has been reduced from Rs 2,10,929 crore (Revised Estimates 2021-2022) to Rs 1,45,919.9 crore. A decline of 65009.1 crore or 30.8% while subsidy on Urea has also been reduced from Rs 75,930.32 crore to Rs 63,222.32 crore. The much bigger concern for us as Indians is the rising costs of ‘Interest Payment and Servicing of Debt’. This has gone up from Rs 8.13 lakh crore to Rs 9.40 lakh crore, a jump of 15.5% over last year. This now makes 23.8% of all expenditure against 21.5% last year.
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