An impossible combination of things that India's Budgets attempt

Successive Indian governments have tried to do what they can't: target economic growth and equitable distribution simultaneously

The finance minister recently said something about her forthcoming Budget being the only one of its kind in 100 years. People laughed at her.
 
Technically, however, what she said is true by a slender margin. We have not had a lockdown caused by a pandemic ever before. But there was one other occasion when the finance minister had to present a Budget in equally terrible, if not worse, circumstances — in 1947, just after India had been divided by the British into two countries.
 
Sir R K Shanmugam Chetty, a businessman from Madras with no particular expertise in