If there is one concept from the Economic Survey that was carried over into the Union Budget, it is "thalinomics". The Survey's last chapter talked about the cost of a thali of food in different parts of India. There wasn't much about food in the Budget, but it certainly was something of a thali. There was a little bit of everything for everyone. And, in the process - as is the case with so many of our cuisines - the thali had no distinct flavour.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had a problem - that she had too many problems. If she had to speak for two hours and 37 minutes and eventually give up after exhausting herself and her listeners, it is partly a reflection of the scale of the issues confronting the government. There was no single issue that that needed immediate addressing. India has a skilling problem; it has an employability problem; it has an employment problem. It has a health problem and a defence funding problem. It has a subsidy problem and an energy problem. Farmers need assistance. Demand is in crisis. Costs are too high. Government finances are strained. Taxes are too low. Small and medium enterprises are suffering. Infrastructure development is slow. Any one of these could have been the centrepiece of a normal year's Budget. They may have been too much of a burden for one year's Budget to carry.
But carry the burden it must. And on that yardstick, this Budget falls short. It has failed to enthuse industry or the markets; it does not have enough to revive either demand or private investment; government finances will be dodgy for years to come.
The question is: what does this reveal about how the second Modi government imagines India's political economy at this fraught moment? In some ways, the very success of the Modi narrative has led to this moment of exhaustion. The Bharatiya Janata Party has effectively dominated every aspect of the India story, and set out to appeal to every spectrum of Indian society (with the exception of religious minorities). Everyone has the right to expect "something", and so they must all be disappointed.
There was no sense that the government understood the urgency of the economic downturn, and how important it was to seize the moment to decisively change people's minds about India's economic and political trajectory. This was a business-as-usual Budget at a time which even Indian business admits is highly unusual.
Reading between the lines of the Budget, however, there is one section of society, however, which it seems the government is anxious to at least begin to provide for: young, unemployed people. And this is both understandable and important. Understandable because the vast pool of unemployed angry young men in India's heartlands are core Modi voters, and important because unless their lot in life is transformed and their aspirations met, we as a country and a society will proceed down a very dark path.
There were multiple interventions hidden the Budget speech that sought to address these young people - though nothing, I fear, at the scale that is needed. They include new courses from institutions that incorporate apprenticeships, engineers being given internships in government at the local body level, a common eligibility test for (non-gazetted) government appointments, and even a few jobs for young people in fishery extension programmes.
If I were to try and interpret this focus - always tricky with this government, but nevertheless essential - I would probably suspect that the political leadership shares the fears that many of us have about the consequences of rudderless, angry youth across India's north and west. These are people that need some sort of anchor in the Indian economy. If they do not, they will find other ways to occupy themselves - ways that might severely strain India's social fabric, and in fact are already doing so. The misguided young man who sought to "goli maaro" the "traitors" in Delhi this week is an important warning of the kind of security threats that will be set off by a failure to attend to the needs of this group.
The fact is that this requires a new approach to economic policy for the government, one that prioritises growth and opportunity. Countries in which possibilities are growing are countries that have less time and space for social discord. But a largely self-employed young cohort, which finds itself without a real ladder to prosperity - that is stuck making pakodas, to return to one of the Prime Minister's less felicitous remarks - is one that is being failed by its state and country, and which will create enemies and turn on them. If 'Modinomics' is just 'pakodanomics', then the rest of his "vision" for this country is impossible.
What we got in this Budget was not just 'pakodanomics', but 'thalinomics'. It was a mess of ideas, of mixed-up priorities - raising tariffs while insisting on creating more tradeable goods for exports, for example. The fear we should all have is that given that we have gone from 'pakodanomics' to 'thalinomics', the next step is 'goli-nomics'. At that point, Budgets won't even matter any more.
(Mihir Swarup Sharma is a fellow at the Observer Research Foundation.)
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