The last full budget of the Narendra Modi government before the 2024 general elections made a consciously populist pitch, with announcements for deprived sections of the population, income tax cuts for the salaried middle class and a hike in capital expenditure.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s speech made a targeted outreach to sections of the population of states that are going to polls, be it through repeated references to tribals -- who are found in significant numbers in poll-bound Tripura, Nagaland, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh – or a specific package for poll-bound Karnataka.
While the budget speech was quiet on the minorities – outreach towards whom the Prime Minister had reportedly advised the recently held BJP national executive to focus on – there were repeated mentions of tribals, Scheduled Castes and the Other Backward Classes.
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“To improve socio-economic conditions of the particularly vulnerable tribal groups (PVTGs), Pradhan Mantri PVTG Development Mission will be launched. This will saturate PVTG families and habitations with basic facilities such as safe housing, clean drinking water and sanitation, improved access to education, health and nutrition, road and telecom connectivity, and sustainable livelihood opportunities,” Sitharaman said in her budget speech. “An amount of Rs 15,000 crore will be made available to implement the Mission in the next three years under the Development Action Plan for the Scheduled Tribes.”
Promising a large teacher-recruitment plan for Ekalavya Model Residential Schools for tribals, she added, “In the next three years, centre will recruit 38,800 teachers and support staff for the 740 Eklavya Model Residential Schools, serving 3.5 lakh tribal students.”
In fact, a major jump in capital expenditure is in the north-east, where the present budget estimate of the capital expenditure at Rs. 24841.8 crores is an 81-percent increase over the Rs. 13687-crore budget estimate of the last financial year.
The north-east apart, the other capital expenditure jumps in the budget estimates are in power projects, petroleum, railway commercial lines, roads and bridges, indicating an infrastructure push.
Be that as it may, the overall budget estimates of capital expenditures specifically on the SCs, STs, OBCs and minorities as a whole have fallen from a budget estimate of Rs. 438.7-crore in 2022-23 to that of Rs. 234.9-crore in the present budget estimates. The revised estimates in the last financial year under this head were Rs. 283.73-crores.
The Finance Minister also promised PM Vishwakarma Kaushal Samman (PM VIKAS), the first-ever scheme for traditional artisans. “The new scheme will enable them to improve the quality, scale and reach of their products, integrating them with the MSME value chain,” Sitharaman said. “The components of the scheme will include not only financial support but also access to advanced skill training, knowledge of modern digital techniques and efficient green technologies, brand promotion, linkage with local and global markets, digital payments, and social security. This will greatly benefit the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, OBCs, women and people belonging to the weaker sections.”
The budget speech announced a unique health outreach to tribals in the form of the Mission to Eliminate Sickle Cell Anaemia by 2047. “It will entail awareness creation, universal screening of 7 crore people in the age group of 0-40 years in affected tribal areas, and counselling through collaborative efforts of central ministries and state governments,” Sitharaman said. This does not entail much of a cost, but seemed to be a clear reaching out to the affected.
As per a paper published by the Indian Journal of Medical Research, “The prevalence of sickle cell carriers among different tribal groups varies from 1 to 40 per cent. Madhya Pradesh has the highest load with an estimated number of 9, 61,492 sickle heterozygotes and 67,861 sickle homozygotes. Further, 27 of the 45 districts in Madhya Pradesh fall under the sickle cell belt and the prevalence of HbS varies from 10 to 33 per cent. It has also been estimated that 13,432 pregnancies would be at risk of having a child with sickle cell disease in this State and the expected annual births of sickle homozygotes would be 3358.” Significantly, Madhya Pradesh goes to polls this year.
The budget also reached out to Karnataka, where many feel the BJP may be on a sticky wicket this time, promising Rs. 5300-crore of central assistance to the Upper Bhadra Project in the drought-prone central Karnataka “to provide sustainable micro irrigation and filling up of surface tanks for drinking water”.
As expected with the general elections coming close, the overall capital expenditure has gone up. “Capital investment outlay is being increased steeply for the third year in a row by 33 per cent to Rs 10 lakh crore, which would be 3.3 per cent of GDP. This will be almost three times the outlay in 2019-20,” Sitharaman said. “This substantial increase in recent years is central to the government’s efforts to enhance growth potential and job creation, crowd-in private investments, and provide a cushion against global headwinds.”
The budget has also increased the outlay of the PM Awas Yojana by 66-percent to over Rs. 79,000-crore.
The budget also sought to reach out to the salaried middle class – the ‘original’ constituency of the BJP before its expansion across social groups – by exempting up to Rs. 7-lakh of annual income from income tax. Above that too, the salaried save varying amounts of money, as per experts who sought to break down the new income tax slabs for viewers on various TV channels.
— The author, Vikas Pathak, is a columnist who teaches at Asian College of Journalism, Chennai. The views expressed are personal.
Read his previous articles here:
(Edited by : C H Unnikrishnan)
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