FM says Budget was not election-oriented
Finance Minister Piyush Goyal on Friday said the measures announced in the interim Budget were not taken keeping in mind the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. “The Budget was not election-oriented, there were 100 things on the table... Issues of need and urgency could not wait," Goyal said.
Union Finance Minister Piyush Goyal said on Friday the government wanted to give a true picture of the accounts in the Budget, and did not resort to any “adjustment” for misrepresenting the fiscal slippage.
The comments come in the backdrop of concerns raised from various quarters, including global rating agencies, about the government’s move to increase spending in a way that it missed the 3.3 per cent deficit target for FY19, and went for a wider 3.4 per cent in FY20.
Speaking at a post-Budget consultation with the industry, Goyal said rounding-off of the decimals is resulting in the slippage, pointing out the deficit will come at 3.367 per cent, while the same for FY20 is 3.349 per cent.
Beyond the optics, Goyal said it was the government’s commitment to transparency which resulted in the actual statement of accounts, and recalled that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had also advised the same in preBudget discussions.
“If I wanted to, this required only an adjustment of 5,017 crore in a budget of ~25 lakh crore to achieve the fiscal deficit target,” he said.
Similarly, an adjustment of ~1,250 crore would have taken the FY20 fiscal deficit number to 3.3 per cent, he said.
Goyal also said the measures announced in the Interim Budget were not taken keeping in mind the upcoming Lok Sabha elections.
“The budget was not election oriented, there were 100 things on the table... Issues of need and urgency could not wait,” he said.
To address the distress in the farm sector, the government in the Budget announced to provide ~6,000 per year to farmers in three instalments under a scheme to be fully funded by the Central government.
Defending the move, Goyal said the support for small farmers announced in the Budget were not a dole but was the government's duty towards them.
The finance minister said Gujarat and Maharashtra are the two states to furnish details of the farmers who would be benefited by the proposed scheme.
Goyal also said the government may provide more funds for the world’s biggest health care scheme — Ayushman Bharat — next year.
In the last four months of the its launch, the scheme has already benefited over 1 million people, he said.
‘Unless we create a distress free health care system for 1.3 billion people in India, unless we look at health in a very holistic fashion right from preventive health care...we will not be able to take people out of distress that health care can cause particularly to lesser privileged,” he said.
Improvement of infrastructure of health care also opens up huge opportunities for companies around the world to participate in effort to expand the health care system, he said.