India unveils ‘green’ budget

Prime Minister Narendra Modi yesterday hailed a “new chapter for India” as his re-elected government unveiled what he called a “green” budget aimed at reviving growth and creating a $5-trillion economy. India was recently leapfrogged by China as the world’s fastest-growing major country, with unemployment in Asia’s third-biggest economy at its highest since the 1970s.

In the first budget since Modi won a second term by a landslide in May, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said she wanted to boost foreign direct investment (FDI) and infrastructure spending. “The government will examine suggestions of further opening up FDI in aviation, media, and, insurance sectors in consultation with stakeholders,” said Sitharaman. The FM also ditched the traditional British-style budget briefcase in favour of a cloth ledger, in what chief economic advisor Krishnamurthy Subramanian said symbolised India’s “departure from the slavery of Western thought”.

Sitharaman, 59, also said India’s public sector banks would be injected with $10.2 billion to tackle bad loans. A sudden collapse of India’s shadow banking sector in 2018 and bad loans had resulted in a liquidity crunch in Asia’s third-largest economy. Sitharaman said that nearly 20 million new houses would be constructed by 2022 and that all rural household would have drinking water by 2024. She also announced that the central government deficit to 3.3 per cent of gross domestic product in fiscal 2019 from 3.4pc in fiscal 2018.

This would be achieved by divestments, including of Air India, increased excise duties on petrol, diesel, precious metals and tobacco, and higher taxes for those earning between 20 million and 50 million rupees ($290,000-730,000). Moody’s said in a research note however that achieving a lower fiscal deficit while maintaining support for growth and incomes would be “very challenging”. “We expect the economy to grow relatively slowly, despite the government’s income support measures,” Moody’s analyst Gene Fang said.

Electric cars

The budget also included tax breaks for individuals on the purchase of electric cars. The government aims to invest in infrastructure and other incentives for electric vehicles to reduce carbon emissions and air pollution. It also wants to increase the use of rivers for transportation, with the volume of cargo on the Ganges set to almost quadruple over the next four years.

The government on Thursday predicted India would rebound and grow at 7.0pc this year and also outlined plans on how to meet the target of doubling its economy by 2025 to $5 trillion. The annual growth in the last fiscal year dipped to 6.8pc from 7.2pc in 2017-18, too slow to create enough jobs for the more than a million Indians entering the labour market every month, economists say.

To name roads, trains after taxpayers

Fancy having a school or a train named after you, or getting priority boarding at airports? In India, this could soon be true for people who pay their taxes in exemplary fashion. In proposals aimed at improving the Asian giant’s low tax intake, the top 10 taxpayers in a district over a decade “could be recognised by naming important buildings, monuments, roads, trains, initiatives... in their name”, the annual Economic Survey released on Thursday suggested.

Other sweeteners could include faster boarding at airports and special “diplomatic-type” lanes at immigration counters, the government report compiled by India’s chief economic advisor said. Erecting “tax money at work” signs next to state construction projects is also a possibility, to “explicitly convey to citizens that their tax money is used in valuable public goods”.