Apropos Shankar Acharya's column "Budget 2014: Good beginning or missed opportunity?" (A Piece of My Mind, July 16), Arun Jaitley seems to have bowled a googly with his maiden Budget, with expert opinions ranging from "mostly good" to "run of the mill". Jaitley has mostly received high praise for undoing some of the muddle that the United Progressive Alliance (UPA)-II created, with reforms in tax administration.
Other than this, the Congress rightly claimed that the Budget document did not read very differently from that of UPA-II, mostly because the two parties do not have significant variety in their economic ideologies. Before promising "vikas" (development), if the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had deliberated on how its economic policies will differ from the quasi-socialist policies of the UPA-II, 45 days would not have been a constraint in announcing bolder reforms to the economy. For example, on the keenly debated issue of subsidies, rather than offering creative solutions, the government has side-stepped action by referring it to an expenditure management commission. Also, could a single corpus to fund a wide variety of government projects based on merit be more streamlined than the quagmire of 29 government projects each with a bill of Rs 100 crore? All this is to say that it certainly is a missed opportunity for the government to offer bolder alternatives, especially when the prime minister had set expectations by suggesting that only bitter pills could save the faltering economy.
Brijesh Sheregar Bangalore
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