The Union Finance Minister has just done the annual ritual of presenting the Government’s Budget proposed to generate funds and spending it during the coming twelve months of the fiscal, ostensibly to safeguard the nation’s economic health in particular and welfare of its populace in general. While the effort attracted adoration from some quarters, the hawks, in no mood to compliment him, lost no time in passing unsavoury remarks that the Finance Minister took in his strides. Described as the last full-fledged Budget exercise by the incumbent Government at the Centre, given the next Parliamentary election of 2019, he seems to have avoided adding insult to injury as it were following the two landmark measures of November 8, 2016 and July 1, 2017, namely demonetisation of currency with face values of 500 rupees and 1,000 rupees as well as implementing Goods & Services Tax regime respectively.

Global financial institutions such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Asian Development Bank and so on are keenly watching the Government’s score card of managing the funds extended by them as long term loans and also aids from other sources such as JICA (Japan International Co-operation Agency). All of them seem to be satisfied with the nation’s economic health, given their already disclosed verdict on GDP growth.

Government’s outlay on public health sector, considered as brazenly inadequate in the past many years, has witnessed a marginal rise to four percent of the country’s GDP. The other sectors, namely education and scientific research may have to wait for better days of handsome funding in future. The plight of agricultural sector in the country, more talked about than being bestowed both policy support and redeeming measures for overcoming the chronic problems, both technical and others, has at last got the focus it needed for long, in accordance with the idiom better late than never. The various measures favourable to sustaining the country’s agrarian economy featured in the Budget may not excite the present players raising the country’s food basket. They are surely peeved at the way urbanites always manage to be in the comfort zone.

One is justified in wishing for a change in the mindset of the policy-markers to bestow attention on the welfare of the country’s rural residents on the same scale and at the same swiftness that urbanites are getting. That must not only happen but also seem to be happening all the time.