If there is one thing that you cannot fault Finance Minister P Chidambaram on, it's the accuracy of his numbers. So, expectedly, the Harvard-educated MBA, who is a corporate lawyer to boot, is not too pleased when anyone tries to find faults on that count. Responding to the Budget in the Lok Sabha a few days back, when he was reeling off subsidies numbers-Budget Estimates of Rs 1,90,015 crore and Revised Estimates of Rs 2,57,654 crore-and was interrupted mid-speech by the Communist Party of India (Marxist)'s Basudeb Acharia claiming that he (Chidambaram) had in fact "cut down" on subsidies, an exasperated finance minister said, "Mr Acharia, I do not know whether you have looked at the numbers. Take the numbers from me, please. We have not cut on social services."
Few minutes later, he again questioned his "critics", which this time around was the "media" raising questions on his "revenue projections". Chidambaram said, "The media... they must be very amazing people... in two hours, they are able to find errors in the numbers that we could not find after two months of churning. As I said, I marvel at the intelligence of these people. I concede we do not have that kind of intelligence. But we have applied our mind to the numbers. I believe that these numbers are absolutely realistic."
