Key Points
Coming right before the Lok Sabha elections, an interim budget is an effective vehicle on which an incumbent government's poll priorities can ride..
With electoral politics becoming a highly contested field as social media connects voters all over the country to the mainstream political discourse, it's naive to assume that the interim budget will just be a vote on account, a measure to get Parliament's permission for money to spend till the new government presents a full budget...
With little chance of the NDA government missing the opportunity to leverage interim budget to address chosen voter segment, Sitharaman too is likely to follow Chidambaram and Goyal by tampering her interim budget with electoral math...
How Piyush Goyal shaped interim budget 2019Chidambaram, then in opposition, called Goyal's announcements a show of desperation and accused the NDA government of violating both convention and the spirit of an interim budget..
How Sitharaman can shape her budgetSitharaman plans to lower budget deficit by at least 50 basis points in 2024-25 from this year's target of 5.9 per cent of the GDP, while also looking to raise capital spending by as much as 20 per cent, Reuters has reported based on information from sources..
