Increasing responsibilities

Fiscal management will become more difficult

In a country like India, the government is often expected to do everything. Given the pressure of electoral politics, governments, both at the Union and states, tend to react to popular pressures and expand the scale and scope of interventions. The state of government finances and quality of expenditure, as a result, suffer. It is worth noting that even before the pandemic, India was running one of the highest general government Budget deficits among its peers and mostly struggled to meet the deficit targets. The pandemic, of course, has worsened the situation, which would take years to correct even if