By Indian standards post-liberalization, and especially by the standards of the Modi government’s pre-pandemic budgets, Budget 2023 is huge: 14.9% of GDP. The government proposes to use its Rs 45 lakh crore expenditure heft to not just boost growth but also to expand the presence of the state to sectors that had escaped its reach. Whether this is a good thing, or a bad thing will depend on the observer’s ideological predilections.
This year’s budget is a bag of misplaced government spending priorities and misses some crucial challenges facing urban development.
The last full Union budget of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government continues to be plagued with the idea that “the private capital will ameliorate some of the basic problems of India and that large capital-intensive technologies will usher in development, including inclusive development.”
How fallacious is this argument? We have seen this in the past three decades. The structural difference brought in by Manmohan Singh’s budget in 1991 was to “shift India’s economy away from the hands of the government to the hands of private enterprise, and embraced free trade.
The IMPRI Center for Environment, Climate Change, and Sustainable Development (CECCSD), IMPRI Impact and Policy Research Institute, New Delhi, organized a panel discussion on ‘The Environment and Union Budget 2023-24’ on 4th February 2023 under the IMPRI 3rd Annual Series of Thematic Deliberations and Analysis of Union Budget 2023-24. The discussion was organized under the #WebPolicyTalk series The State of the Environment- #PlanetTalks. The session was chaired by Mr Ashish Kothari, Founder-Member at Kalpavriksh, Pune and the moderator for the session was Dr Simi Mehta, CEO & Editorial Director, IMPRI.
Defence, Foreign Policy and Union Budget 2023-24 | Panel Discussion | #DiplomacyDialogue #IMPRI Center for International Relations and Strategic Studies (CIRSS), IMPRI Impact and Policy Research Institute, New Delhi invites you to an IMPRI #WebPolicyTalk series: The State of International…
Cities and Union Budget 2023-24 | Panel Discussion | #CityConversations #IMPRI Center for Habitat, Urban and Regional Studies (CHURS), IMPRI Impact and Policy Research Institute, New Delhi invites you to an IMPRI #WebPolicyTalk series: The State of Cities – #CityConversations…
How come the government has shown sober responsibility rather than wanton populism in the last full Budget available to it before the 2024 General Election? We see many pundits struggle with this puzzle on television and in newspaper columns and either remain puzzled or conclude that this government stands tall, beyond the temptations of expedience to which ordinary mortals are prone.