Selling dreams for the future
The finance minister, in pitching her 2022-23 Budget as a blueprint to steer India@75 towards India@100, may have been more Nirmala, meaning pure and virtuous, than Nostradamus, the impossibly prescient man who saw tomorrow. She must, however, be lauded for daring to look into the future in which even the need for an annual Budget might disappear as a technology-driven government could take decisions in real time than express them in annual, highprofile presentations that started in 1860. If anyone believed this was close to a noBudget, he/she might be peeping into a future where there will indeed be less visible government in a digital world.
The recognition of cryptocurrency as an asset class is futuristic even if only the passage of time will tell if it’s the world’s craftiest Ponzi scheme or a form of antigovernment symbolism that will power an alternative economy. Public faith can be expected to drive investments in a ‘desi’ — IndiaCoin or such — to be floated by the RBI as sovereign guarantee behind coins of the realm may still power their legitimacy 25 years hence. The accent on drone shakti is a recognition of hi-tech fast transforming a world, especially through artificial intelligence applied in education, healthcare, autonomous and electric cars and agriculture. To give more refined digital and audio-visual channels to schoolchildren who have been deprived of classroom education for two years cannot be praised enough.
We must, however, be practical in accepting that the present is somewhat disappointing when all the great things seem to lie in India’s rosy future, like bullet trains which have been running on Shinkansen rails in Japan for 50 years, 5G technology that is being rolled out around the world, widespread electric mobility that may ultimately force petrol bunks out of business while keeping the air over cities clean, solar energy that homes may store by day and expend by night and, one day, perhaps even nuclear fusion providing power so cheap as to do away with the need for electricity meters. The licence to dream has been there forever and, maybe, it was time it entered the Budget, too.