 "Nirmala Sitharaman, Sitharaman")
Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, presenting the Interim Budget 2024 in Parliament on Thursday, announced a Rs 1 trillion corpus to help finance research in technology. She also said that a new scheme will be announced "to strengthen deep tech technologies for defence purposes and Atmanirbharta".
Calling innovation the "foundation of development", the finance minister said, "A corpus of Rs 1 trillion will be established with a 50-year interest-free loan provided. The corpus will provide long-term financing or refinancing with long tenors and low or nil interest rates. This will encourage the private sector to scale up research and innovation significantly in sunrise domains."
She also recalled former prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri's famous saying "Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan", which former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee expanded to "Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan, Jai Vigyaan" and Prime Minister Narendra Modi changed to "Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan, Jai Vigyaan, Jai Anusandhan [Research]".
During her speech, Sitharaman hailed digital public infrastructure. She highlighted that through direct benefit transfer to PM Jan Dhan's accounts, the government has disbursed Rs 34 trillion to beneficiaries and saved the government Rs 2.75 trillion by plugging leakages.
Speaking of the Skill India Mission, Sitharaman said that it had trained 14 million youth and reskilled and upskilled another 5.4 million youth.
She further mentioned that 1,361 mandis had been integrated into the electronic National Agriculture Market (eNAM), which had provided services to 18 million farmers. eNAM has seen a trading volume of Rs 3 trillion, she added.
