A political Budget

It is a smartly crafted document that, amidst the din of a pro-Bharat policy package, further opens up the Indian economy to foreign capital

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman last Friday made rural India the centrepiece of her first Budget’s political narrative. “At the centre of everything we do, we keep ‘gaon, garib, aur kisan'”, she said in her 2019-20 Budget speech, implying that not India, but Bharat constituting the villagers, farmers and the poor would be her primary concern. Do her Budget numbers try to address that concern by significantly increasing the financial allocation for schemes meant for rural India?
 
Take rural development as an example. Rural development is a sector that concerns farmers, villages and the poor. But the Budget for 2019-20