Budget 2019: India won't become a superpower with these allocations

Only 3.4% of total federal spending was budgeted for education - down from 3.74% the previous year and from 4.3% when Modi took over in 2014

Traditionally, India’s finance minister carries the annual budget to Parliament in an old-fashioned briefcase; photographs of him holding the briefcase up are usually splashed across the front pages the next day. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, the first woman to hold the post, broke tradition last Friday by carrying her budget in a folded red cloth cover, of the sort used by some trading communities in India to store their accounts.

Having provoked the flurry of media attention the gesture was intended to generate, Sitharaman’s deputy was happy to explain: The new finance minister meant to break with a tradition inherited