It’s a great speech in terms of quoting poetry, sloka and praising Narendra Modi. However, in terms finance and budgeting it’s going to be another BJP wala Jhumla.
Let me try to find out some jhumlas for you –
1) Finance Minister Dr. Sarma said that it will take 80 years to double the farm income in the current rate of growth and that’s why he has proposed to start nine sub-missions. Under those sub-missions 1.20 crores will be invested in each revenue village. Total requirement for the mission is whopping 30000 crores. In the next point, Finance Minister says that for the current year he proposes to allocate 50,000 lakhs. If the allocation follows the current trend in next five years, the government will be able to spend only 2500 crores. In other words it will take 60 years to spend 30000 crores in current rate of allocation.
2) Dr. Sarma talked about Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) but there is no direction or fund allocation found in his budget speech to meet the SDGs. No poverty, zero hunger, good health and quality education are the major goals among the 17 goals. If finance minister feels that his proposed 40 mobile medical units will achieve SDG#3 (good health) in tea gardens where MMR is as high as 480 then it’s nothing but another jhumla. He also proposes 5 boat ambulances to provide round the clock Emergency Referral Services to over 300000 char dwellers. Anyone can guess what kind of parivartan this budget will bring. Another interesting budget provision is to provide roof top solar panel in char and remote areas; government wants to achieve SDG#1, SDG#2 and SDG#4 by installing roof top solar panel? Where percentage of BPL family is nearly 70%??
3) The budget has a provision to set up a land bank to provide land to the corporate to set up their business units; but budget doesn’t have anything to say about the landless farmers of the state or internally displaced persons induced by erosion in Brahmaputra valley.
4) The budget has provision of one-time ex-gratia of Rs 5 lakh per family of the Martyrs of Assam Agitation. But the victims of Assam Agitation couldn’t draw the attention of finance minister. In Nellie more than three thousand innocent people were killed by the agitators. Government provided Rs. 5000 to the victims and Rs. 25000 to the perpetrators who got killed in Nellie.
5) People are saying that this one of the longest budget speech of our times. The English text of the speech is one hundred and sixty one pages and in terms of word count – more than forty thousand words said in the speech. But do you know how many words he chose for flood and disaster management? Only one hundred and eighty eight words! Similar proportion reflected in the budget allocation as well. Not bad, not bad at all. Who cares for the flood affected people?
(Abdul Kalam Azad is TISS-UNICEF Research Fellow and founder secretary of Jhai Foundation)
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