BS jury: A delicate balancing act with rural push

The Business Standard jury of industry captains assesses the focus of Arun Jaitley's Budget 2017

Arundhati Bhattacharya
Chairman

The Budget is in line with the development priorities of the nation. Several initiatives in the rural space such as ensuring flow of credit, enhanced crop insurance coverage, soil health cards, geo-tagging of MNREGA assets, setting up of the National Rural Drinking Water programme are steps in that direction. For the banking sector, the thrust to digital economy is on expected lines. Affordable housing gets the status of infrastructure, which will be beneficial for the banks, borrowers and builders. Given the domestic and international macroeconomic environment, it has achieved the