Letters: Old tricks

This refers to Andy Mukherjee's article "Mr Chidambaram's magic show" (February 19). The creative accounting done with India's Budget is nothing new. The tricks are all known: pushing subsidies to the next financial year, compressing expenditure, over-estimating gross domestic product growth rates, advance collection under duress of indirect taxes, delaying tax refunds and supplier payments and fudging with small savings. No one even talks about the black hole of future obligations towards retired government employees on pension and medicare. Only in India is it possible for a finance minister to announce one-rank-one-pension for the armed services, without giving even the slightest hint of how much that is likely to cost over the next five to 10 years. The savvy market people tend to read through the numbers and not be taken in by the magic show. And these sham economic numbers become a historical fact for future brandishing by political parties claiming to be better fisc managers.

P Datta Kolkata

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