Friday, November 9, 2012

Sonia’s dream budget

This year’s Budget may be finalised at 10, Janpath, and not 7, Race Course Road. The FM has a new team to help him balance political and economic pressures. By PRAMOD KUMAR

On the last day of this month, in a leap year, the UPA government will unveil what could be its last full-fledged Budget before the general elections in 2009. It obviously implies that the FM P. Chidambaram will need to do a tough balancing act between pre-poll populist pressures and a desire to carry forward the reforms agenda to please both foreign and domestic investors. This year, India’s two pillars of reforms, PM Manmohan Singh and Chidambaram, will have an almost new Budget A-Team to win the electorate’s hearts, and also push economic growth and reforms.

Heading the team is finance secretary, Duvvuri Subbarao, an economist who has had the benefit of a stint in the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council. Subbarao, who began the corporate practice of offsite retreats for the Department of Economic Affairs officials, is an Andhra Pradesh cadre IAS topper of the 1972 batch. Helping him closely will be revenue secretary, P.V. Bhide, expenditure secretary, Sanjiv Mishra, the chief economic advisor in the finance ministry, Arvind Virmani, and the newly-appointed advisor to the finance minister, Shubhashis Gangopadhyay, who joined less than a month ago. Mishra is the only old hand in this Budget group. Gangopadhyay and Virmani, both reputed economists, have a crucial role in the Budget exercise with the government facing the dual challenges of a possible inflation jump and deceleration in key sectors. Nor is news on the global front encouraging with the threat of recession in developed economies like the US looming large. Virmani, appointed last July, is a Harvard economist who did his thesis under Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow. He is a ‘Manmohanite’, having worked with the current PM during his FM avatar as his advisor on policy planning. He will bring to the table his recent experience in the Planning Commission, where he was the principal advisor.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.

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