A Budget for Politics, Not Growth with Rajeswari Sengupta
Insights on why the recent budget fell short of economic expectations
In this episode, author and journalist Puja Mehra speaks to economist Rajeswari Sengupta to scrutinize the government's fiscal strategy in the latest budget. Sengupta offers candid insights on how the shift from transparent fiscal deficit targets to a more opaque debt-to-GDP approach—coupled with expenditure cuts and generous tax reliefs—is unlikely to spur growth. Tune in for a discussion that goes into the arithmetic of fiscal management, the risks of masking structural weaknesses, and the broader implications for India's economic future.
ABOUT RAJESWARI SENGUPTA
Rajeswari Sengupta is currently an associate professor of economics at Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR). Her research focuses on policy-relevant issues of emerging economies in general and India in particular, in the fields of empirical macroeconomics, international finance, monetary policy, banking and financial institutions, firm financing and national accounts measurement.
In the past she has held research positions at the Institute for Financial Management and Research (IFMR) in Chennai, San Francisco Federal Reserve, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington DC and Reserve Bank of India, Delhi. She was a member of the research secretariat to the Bankruptcy Law Reforms Committee that drafted India's Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC, 2016). She has published in reputed international journals such as Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Economic Policy, Journal of International Money and Finance, The World Economy, Emerging Markets Review, Pacific Economic Review, Open Economies Review as well as the Economic and Political Weekly in India. She has also written chapters in various books published by the Asian Development Bank, G20, the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), among others.
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TRANSCRIPT
Puja Mehra: Rajeswari, thanks for coming on the show to discuss the budget. My pleasure. Okay, so probably what most listeners love the most about this budget is the tax relief for the middle class.
Prime Minister Modi said that this is the most middle class friendly budget. And, you know, the finance minister had invited a few of us journalists to lunch at her residence the day after she presented the budget. And this was an off the record meeting, but since most of what she said to me that day, she eventually went and said in her media interviews also eventually, so I suppose I can narrate the conversation I had with her before I ask you the question I have for you, without really breaching the rules of engagement of that conversation with her.
My first question to her was that given conventional wisdom is that the expenditure multipliers of government expenditure tend to be higher than that for tax relief, why she had chosen to give the tax relief that she has for giving the consumption stimulus to the economy. Of course, there was a demand for it, but you know why she had chosen the instrument of tax relief rather than say some expenditure boost to the low income classes in the country. And her reply was that consumption stimulus would be a byproduct of what she has done.
But the income tax relief was primarily done because it was the brief from the prime minister to her that the middle class taxpayers should feel that the government acknowledges their contribution to the tax kitty. So the main purpose and objective of this, she didn't say this, the word that I, this is my words that, you know, it seems to me that it was a political move. And we are recording this episode before the Delhi election results are declared and also before the Reserve Bank of India's monetary policy review is announced.
So we don't have that information with us yet. But still, it does seem to me that the most talked about part of the budget, which is the income tax relief, was more of a political move than an economic move. And you're an economist.
So my question to you is that it may eventually turn out to be very good politics, but how good was it for the economy? Was it really good economics?
Rajeswari Sengupta: Right. Thanks, Puja, for the question. So let me answer this question in three parts.
In the first part, what I would like to say is that what we saw in this year's union budget is that I think there was a continuous political undertone across all the measures that were announced. Predominantly, for example, we saw a lot of measures particularly announced for the state of Bihar. And yes, this whole tax relief that was announced seems like a response to the loud clamour that was coming on behalf of the middle class employees, the salaried Indian, that they need some kind of a tax relief.
And it seemed that this was done in response to that. So I would agree that even when I was listening to the budget, it did seem to me that there is a very strong political undertone to many of the measures announced in the budget, including the tax relief. I per se don't think there is anything outrightly wrong with that because at the end of the day, the government can only govern if they're elected to power.
But I also think and I wish that a relatively small part of the budget was dedicated to achieving political objectives. And the main feature of the budget was not sold or pitched in this manner. It is a part of an appreciation for what the middle class is doing for us because it actually should have been pitched more as a fiscal stimulus because any economist that leads it would think of it as a fiscal stimulus. So I wish that relatively smaller resources were expended to achieve political objectives and larger part of the budget I wish was used to address deeper structural problems in the economy, such as growth, jobs, etc.
I don't really think that was done. The second part of my answer relates to what you asked me as an economist, what do I think of this specific measure? Now, what the government predominantly did that we all know by now is that they announced tax relief for middle class salaried employees, particularly those earning up to rupees 12 lakh per annum, saying that they will no longer be subject to income tax.
And there were some tax reductions for other income slabs as well. Now, this has been widely regarded as a stimulus that will revive consumption demand. The point that I want to make here is, as a result of this measure, it actually leaves the bulk of the population unaffected because barely 2.1 percent of Indians pay taxes. Out of 1.4 billion Indians, roughly 30 million Indians file not nil or other positive tax returns, which is roughly about 2.1 to 2.2 percent. So given that such a small municipal percentage of people are paying taxes, offering this tax relief essentially means that not a whole lot of people will actually be benefited or affected by it. Secondly, the size of the tax relief itself is quite modest because it amounts to about 0.3 percent of GDP, which is almost like a rounding error. It's really nothing substantial, particularly if you look at the scale of problems at hand with GDP growth slowing down, with jobs, with private investment slowing down. Given the magnitude of the problem at hand, the size of the tax relief was extremely modest. And I really doubt that this is going to have any big effect on reviving consumption demand on a sustained basis.
And finally, in a situation when growth is slowing down, jobs are not easy to come by. We know the stock market boom has ended. Many Indian households are invested in the stock market.
And the fact that household balance sheets are very heavily leveraged, they are borrowed quite a bit to finance their consumption. In that kind of a backdrop, if a middle-class, average Indian household gets a tax relief, I think the chances of that household spending that additional money on consumption are relatively low. It is quite likely instead this money will actually get saved or will get used to repay household debts.
So as a result, because of these three points I mentioned, I think it's quite doubtful that this measure will provide any substantial boost to aggregate demand. And my third point is, related to this tax relief, what the government has effectively done is that it has taken millions out of the tax net. So 12 lakh is actually quite a big limit.
It's basically 1 lakh rupees a month. That's not negligible in a country where the per capita GDP is very, very low. In dollar terms, it's $2,600 per year.
It's very low. So for such a country, a 12 lakh income being exempted from tax, income tax, means that a large proportion of taxpayers are actually now being kept out of the tax net. I very much doubt if any other country would give such a big and generous tax exemption.
And in a way, all of us have always been saying that in India, we need to widen the tax net. Because the tax net is not very broad-based, there is always a very high fiscal deficit, which leads into government borrowing, et cetera, et cetera. So now, instead of widening the tax net, what this government move does is actually just the opposite, to shrink the tax net.
And mind you, this is not a temporary measure, and that is the bit that really worries me. Because this is a permanent thing. Once you have removed people earning till 12 lakhs out of income tax, not just this government, no government will be able to bring them back into the tax net without building significant political repercussions, which means is that you have actually ended up shrinking the tax net at a time when you should be doing the opposite.
So A, I don't think this is a very big stimulus to consumption demand. And B, I think this should have been thought through a lot more before making it almost like a permanent feature in the fiscal maps of the government.
Puja Mehra: So in fact, what you're saying, Rajeswari, is also what the finance minister said. I've been a little surprised by all the commentary from many economists I'm reading in newspapers on how this is going to be a big consumption stimulus. In fact, she told me that, you know, Puja, it may not lead to consumption, it may get saved.
So she does understand, I think, what she has done. And clearly, this is more for politics. Although I did not talk to her about the long term impact of permanently shrinking the tax base.
But I'm quite sure that she would also be, and the government is aware that the tax department would have apprised her of it, because she said, it took a long time for her to get the tax department, the tax board to agree with this particular proposal. It was not easy to do it. So I suppose they discussed it and they have decided to make this sacrifice.
And that's my question, really, that politics aside, how is this going to play out in the larger context of the GDP growth slowdown? We are seeing in the last one year, the growth rate has slowed down from almost 8% to about 6%.
Rajeswari Sengupta: Yes. So before we go to the growth point, Puja, let me make one more point in context of the tax relief, is that when you take out millions of taxpayers from the tax net, and yet you have a relatively ambitious fiscal deficit target of 4.4% of GDP for this year, essentially what you're doing is you're combining a shrinking tax net with a very ambitious fiscal deficit target. And what that implies is you're actually putting a lot of pressure on the existing taxpayers to cough up money in order to be able for the government to meet the fiscal deficit target.
And my worry is, and of course, this is just a worry, I really hope it remains a worry, is that I hope this doesn't lead to aggressive tax enforcement, because those who are left behind now will basically have to compensate for those who have been kept out of the tax net. And if, as a result of this, we see very aggressive tax enforcement, we see tax terrorism, we see a lot of tax raids, then any such misstep in tax administration or any such overreach could undermine the very growth the government could be trying to stimulate. So I think this is something that we should all watch closely. How are these two squares? On one hand, you're shrinking the tax net, on the other hand, you want to gradually keep reducing the fiscal deficit.
So how are you going to do that, if in a situation the nominal GDP growth rate, or to put it very simply, the economy continues to slow down? So I think that's something that I would really watch very closely.
Puja Mehra: Since you raised the fiscal deficit point, let's discuss that right now itself, which is that I noticed they've been reducing the fiscal deficit by compressing expenditure. I don't know if that is what was on their mind when they decided to sacrifice such a huge chunk of the tax base. Or perhaps they were thinking that they will, in the GST Council, manage to convince the states to do something, because she has been talking about rationalising the GST, and maybe they hope to raise more in revenue from there.
Or maybe they think that they're going to get the money from the RBI, which has been giving them huge dividends. I did ask her about privatisation and, you know, I do not get the sense that there is any aggressive or ambitious privatisation goal that the government is looking at. So if they are going to be continuing with this trend of reducing the fiscal deficit by reducing expenditure, that brings me back to the question of GDP growth.
How are they going to manage?
Rajeswari Sengupta: Again, so multiple ways to answer the question. The first thing is, since you brought up the point of GST, see, it would be great if they are able to do rationalisation of GST, because GST, when implemented with all good intentions, we all know how implementation has gone haywire with multiple rates and exemptions and et cetera, et cetera. So if attempts are genuinely made to rationalise the GST structure, I think that would be great, irrespective of what they have done with the tax relief.
I think that is a reform that needs to be refined completely orthogonal to the income tax relief that has been provided, irrespective of that. But also, we have to keep one thing in mind, Puja, is that when we look at direct taxes like income tax, there is a certain progressive structure to it, which really works well. The poor people pay less tax, but the richer people pay more tax, and that's a very nice system.
When it comes to GST, which is an indirect tax, there is no element of being progressive. In fact, in some sense, it is a regressive tax system, because the poor and rich are all paying the same kind of taxes, depending upon the goods and services that they're consuming. And of course, as a result, the GST tax net is much wider, because even non-income earning people who are not taxpayers, so to speak, would be paying GST. So if they somehow try to compensate for this tax revenue loss from income taxes by increasing GST, that I think would be really bad economics, because as I said, that's a more regressive tax, and that should not be used as a compensation in any way to make up for the lost tax revenue. But as I said, if they do rationalisation of GST, actually bring it down to all the same rate and a lower rate, then that's great. But that is just a separate GST reform, but that shouldn't be used to compensate for the tax revenue.
Puja Mehra: And right here itself, let me also point out that last time when they cut the corporate tax rate, they had underestimated the revenue foregone, and they may have actually underestimated the revenue foregone this time also for the income tax relief. They may actually need to raise more.
Rajeswari Sengupta: Yes, I won't be surprised if that happens. Because their 4.4% fiscal deficit target for 2025-2026 is predicated on the assumption that personal income tax revenue will grow at about 14% to 15% on a year-on-year basis. Now, once you have already shrunk the income tax net and assuming that nominal GDP is going to grow at 10%, I think that's a very optimistic, very ambitious assumption.
And if you start calling that into question, then that 4.4% deficit again seems a little bit doubtful to me. Now, yes, it is possible that the Reserve Bank of India could be transferring rupees 2 lakh crore of dividend this year as well, which can be a very big bonus for the government. But given that there is a growth slowdown, which has a direct impact on tax collections, and on top of that, you're forgoing a lot of revenue by removing people from the tax net, I'm really not sure how these two are going to square off again.
And as I said, GST should not be used to do the compensation, because it's a regressive design, just by definition of being an indirect tax. Now, on the growth point, Puja, so what really fascinates me is I find a lot of these economists and commentators keep getting caught up in this debate about whether the current slowdown is cyclical or structural. At this point, I think it doesn't honestly matter, because the economy is in doldrums.
It is not in a good shape, and it has not been in a good shape for a while. And we seem to be forgetting all the structural weaknesses that we have inherited from before the pandemic time. Before COVID, the GDP growth had fallen to less than 4%.
COVID happens, it's like a veil in front of our eyes. After the lockdown is lifted, of course, there is an automatic revival to the economy because sectors are opening up. There is a big consumption boom that is happening.
Services exports increase, you have all these global capability centres phenomenon happening. And on top of that, the government does CapEx infrastructure. So that also creates a little bit of a boost in aggregate demand.
But all of that has sort of come to an end because that reopening or revival stimulus, that boost is no longer there. Services exports, yes, they are growing, but goods exports are barely growing at 1%, 2%. Government CapEx, they did it for two, three years.
But after a point of time, the marginal benefit of constructing one more road or one more highway or one more bridge is highly limited. And they can see for themselves that the very reason for doing CapEx investment by the government, which was to encourage the private sector to invest, is not happening. There is no additional factory that is getting built because of all the infrastructure that is coming up.
So in a way, the purpose of CapEx spending is kind of getting defeated because, mind you, the government CapEx is barely 3% of GDP. That's not a whole lot of money. What really needed to happen was the private sector to start investing because that's the big bucks that we're talking about.
But that has not happened yet. For two years, three years, we have been waiting. Balance sheets are clean.
The government is doing infrastructure. Still, private investment is not picking up. So there are these fundamental problems that are there in the economy.
And we all know problems with the informal sector, problems with job creation. But I didn't see anything in the budget that, first of all, even acknowledged the problem. Forget about trying to come up with solutions.
The budget at no point of time, the budget speech, even acknowledged that there are some structural weaknesses that need to be addressed, that there is a slowdown of the growth momentum. There was no recognition of the problems that are there in the economy. And it's like if the narrative is that if it ain't broke, don't fix it, then, of course, you're going to get the budget that we got because there is no acknowledgement that there is a problem.
And hence, the only sort of growth-orientated measure that everybody's talking about is this tax relief, which, as you and I both talked about, it's not a growth-orientated measure. So bottom line, there are the problems in the economy that have been festering for a while. And now it is showing up even in official GDP data, notwithstanding all its measurement problems.
And then there is the government's biggest policy framework of the year, which is the annual budget, which did not contain any growth-orientated measure, so to speak. So I think there is this disjointed problem versus solution thing going on here.
Puja Mehra: Yeah, I mean, I want to say this here, Rajeshri, that I am actually stunned. I've been writing now for more than a year. I remember last year's budget, I had written that there was a consumption slowdown, consumption growth was slower than GDP growth.
So I had written that after so many years of capex welfare growth strategy of the budget, that we are getting this consumption slowdown, something's not working. Then this year after the July budget, I mean, not this year, last year after the July budget, I had written that if there is such a big capex welfare push happening, then why is it that we are seeing so much food inflation? Why, due to supply-side issues, why are the supply-side bottlenecks not getting resolved?
That means that the capex has not been designed well. And two, why are state governments offering these cash handouts to women? Because that also means that there is a political requirement to compensate for stagnant wages and incomes are not growing, which they would have if there was a GDP growth happening because of the capex strategy of so many years.
So this strategy is not working. And now the budget has responded by doing pretty much nothing, as you're saying. And just one day after the budget, all the newspapers were full of full-page advertisements from all the industry chambers, from the association of small and medium-scale industry, etc., congratulating the government for an extremely economy-friendly budget. So I don't understand this, as you said, the disconnect between how people feel about the budget and the economy. If you read this, other than some of the economists who are actually quite close to the government, such as Dr. Sujit Bala, who we may disagree with the reasons that he argued are responsible for the slowdown, but he did write a very sharp piece on how there is a slowdown because there are policy errors. But other than that, everybody is quite happy with the state of affairs.
Rajeswari Sengupta: See, it's like if everybody's happiness was good enough for pushing up the GDP growth in the economy, then that would be great. But that's not unfortunately how it works. So yes, let them be happy, let them celebrate the budget in their own way and let them call it a revolutionary, common man's dream budget, whatever it is.
But I think the numbers will start showing again that things are not going well in the economy. And at some point, there has to be a reckoning that the strategy adopted by the government is simply not working. You know, this government, basically their growth strategy, to put it very simplistically, is dependent on two main pillars.
One was, you create a conducive environment for the private sector by building infrastructure. And on the other hand, you provide incentives for the firms to invest for the PLI scheme, and you give them protection through very high import tariffs. That's basically the two main pillars of the growth strategy that I can think of.
Now, both of these have not worked. The strategy has not paid the expected dividend. So hence, this was the budget when they should have recognised that neither the scheme of giving incentives and protection for import tariffs is working, nor this infrastructure investment is really leading the benefit that it was intended to, which was encouraging the private sector to invest.
And that's when the reflection should have happened, that why is the private sector not investing? What else is going wrong? What can be done?
And even in terms of the CAPEX design, Puja, it is not just building roads and highways. They also pumped in millions of rupees into propping up failing public sector enterprises, you know, putting money into MTNL. I really don't see the point of doing this.
Why do you want to prop up and re-bolster failing public sector enterprises and call that CAPEX investment? That doesn't have any multiplier effect whatsoever. So I think, A, the way the CAPEX was designed, and B, of course, to some extent, it was okay for a couple of years because the economy was not doing well and the government needed to provide some expenditure support.
But beyond that, as I said, there is no marginal benefit anymore, and they need to probably get more creative with their CAPEX spending if they want to do it at all. I mean, even in this budget, they haven't really announced any substantial expansion of CAPEX, perhaps because they realised that it's yielding the benefit that they thought it would. And instead, I think what has happened is that the welfare schemes continue unabated.
You know, if you're really the fifth largest economy and you're growing so fast and everything is going so well, then I keep on asking this question, why do you need to give free food grains to 800 million people every year? I just don't see the logic in it. You know, it was a pandemic time, once in a crisis emergency measure that you resorted to, fair enough.
But given that you believe the economy is doing so well, and it's just a mere cyclical slowdown that will correct itself from the next quarter itself, and India will continue to grow at 78%, which economy growing at 78% gives free food grains to 800 million people? I mean, you know, it just doesn't make any sense in my mind. It is so contradictory.
And you're doing it because you know fundamentally that the situation on the ground is not as good, and you're not going to be winning elections if you just relied on a narrative or a PLI or a CAPEX investment. So you need to win elections, which is why you're basically doing all these populist welfare schemes. And on the other hand, you're doing some of these so-called growth-orientated measures, which are not working.
But fundamentally, if you look at even the wage income scenario, there was a report by FICCI that was released last year, which showed that out of five, six major sectors in the economy, the nominal wage growth, the CAGR of nominal wage growth between 2019 and 2023 ranged from a mere 0.5% to about 5.4% or so. And if you take an average inflation of 6% during this time, what this means, again, to put simplistically, is that the real wage was witnessing a negative growth. Real wages were falling during this period.
So when you have an economy where the real wage growth is falling, and there are no new jobs that are getting created, and you have these millions of unemployed youth entering into the workforce every year, and all that the government is offering is, of course, feebies and welfare schemes, etc., then you start questioning that what's the point of people being happy about a budget and calling it revolutionary?
I mean, I agree with you. I don't know what they are seeing in it. And I don't know what the game is here, that I honestly don't understand why the government is not seeing the problems that you and I are seeing.
And why are they not responding to it? Because at some point, the reckoning has to happen. At some point, it will show up, either in election results or some other way.
But I'm very worried. I listened to the budget and I was very worried because I thought this was the juncture at which they should have woken up and said, we need to announce some reform measures, we need to announce some structural policy initiatives, and revisit our own strategy of doing PLI, maybe even use PLI, improve it, figure out what else can be done. But as I said, I didn't even see an acknowledgement of the problem, let alone any announcement of policy measures to address it.
Puja Mehra: Since the budget is all about the fiscal calculations and arithmetic, the insincere praise from economists and industry groups, etc, extends to the entire management of the fiscal deficit. If you've been reducing the fiscal deficit by reducing expenditure, and not because you're raising the revenue, it'll catch up with you at some point. And that is actually showing in this time's papers, where they say that even by 2031, they don't expect the debt-to-GDP ratio to reduce too much.
Even in the best-case scenario, where they've assumed different GDP growth rates, the best-case scenarios, they've assumed 11% nominal GDP growth rate. 2031, the central government's debt-GDP ratio is still above 50%. It was 40-something percent in 2014 when the government changed, when India was supposedly in the fragile five grouping.
What is all this sort of acrobatics being done for fiscal management if the situation doesn't really change much even till 2031?
Rajeswari Sengupta: From an economic standpoint, it doesn't make sense. It's actually sort of a wrong fiscal strategy, I would say. Because when you know that the economy is slowing down and the private sector is not, there is no animal spirits in the private sector, so to speak, right?
They are not investing, exports are not growing. Then as the government, the last thing that you should be doing is cutting down on your expenditure. And I'm not saying revenue expenditure, the welfare schemes, etc., that's a whole different ballgame altogether because they have no multiplier effect and it's just a transfer. But any expenditure that creates assets, that's why I think they should have probably been more creative in this budget and figured out a better way of doing profits, which could have a higher multiplier effect. But instead of increasing expenditure, they are cutting down on it. And instead of trying to increase tax revenue, they're actually giving up on tax revenue by pushing millions out of the tax cut.
So that doesn't really make any economic sense because revenue mobilisation is the best way of reducing fiscal deficit when the economy is slowing down. And in privatisation, I really don't think it's going to bear fruits because the private sector is not investing in any case. What are the chances of the private sector taking up government assets?
I really don't think that that's really going to work out. Barring RBI dividend, I really don't see where the tax revenue growth is going to come from. That's why I said I'm very skeptical about the 14-15% growth in personal income tax that they have.
So as it is when the economy is slowing down, it's difficult for the government to earn tax revenue. On top of that, you've done this huge generous tax relief, which is going to bite them in the back as far as tax revenue is concerned. And on top of that, you're trying to do fiscal deficit reduction by doing an expenditure compromise, which again has no growth impact because it has the opposite of a growth impact.
So it's either from a growth perspective or from a fiscal deficit reduction perspective, it didn't really make any economic sense to me. The other point, Puja, I would like to make here is they have made this shift to targeting debt to GDP ratio. And frankly, that makes me a bit uncomfortable.
Because the fiscal deficit to GDP is a much more transparent target than every year when the budget is announced, we see the math, we see what's the total income, we see what's the total expenditure, and we can calculate the fiscal deficit ourselves. And we know this is what the government is saying. And that is what the original FRB and Act also said, that bring the fiscal deficit down to 3% or 3.5% of GDP. But now when this government is shifting to sort of this debt to GDP target, that makes me a little bit nervous, because debt to GDP is a much more hazy target. We don't really get to see, I mean, how many of us would actually go through all the details and figure out what the debt to GDP ratio is. It's a relatively hazy target.
And it's, again, you can keep a debt to GDP ratio relatively high for a long period of time without being accountable, because at the end of the day, all of your debt is denominated in rupees. There is no penalty that you're really paying by borrowing a lot of money in the market, because you have a captive audience because of financial depression. Do not get too technical.
Essentially, you're borrowing from your own banks and pension funds and insurance agencies. So you can keep doing that for a while. There is, practically speaking, no penalty for doing it.
That's why it makes me nervous. Whereas if it was a fiscal deficit, there is much more accountability. Because there's a lot of hue and cry in the media, et cetera, if the government is not able to meet a certain fiscal deficit target.
But the moment you go to this debt GDP territory, it's way more hazy and opaque. And I feel the accountability goes down to a large extent. And that's why, I mean, that's another part of this fiscal strategy that worries me, that why are we doing this?
I mean, you know, all over the world, the fiscal deficit is something that is being watched. Let's just stick to what it was in the original FRBM Act.
Puja Mehra: Right. So pretty much what you're saying is that the budget is not as pro-growth as it could have been.
Rajeswari Sengupta: Yes, I would basically go out on a limb and say that it's not pro-growth at all. I think there's a very strong political undertone to the measures announced in the budget. But other than that, I mean, there's a whole lot of small measures.
The funny thing is, I felt that they made all the right noises because they picked up all the right cases, right? So investment, AI, MSME, you know, all of these things that people talk about. But when you looked at the substance of it, there was no depth.
There was no substance. So I definitely don't think this is a pro-growth budget. I think this is a budget that is announced before a very crucial election.
And I feel that the government is underestimating the extent of challenges that lie ahead, particularly given that the global environment is becoming increasingly uncertain. And this is when the domestic economy needs to become strong through consumption, investment, etc. But there was no attention that was paid to that.
And as I said, I would be worried about what the growth prospects are and where will growth come from going forward, if this is the lack of vision that the government displayed through the budget document.
Puja Mehra: Right. Thank you.
Thank you for summing it up so well.
Rajeswari Sengupta: Thank you so much, Puja.
