A budget for the voters

The New Indian Express First Published : 02 Mar 2011 11:36:00 PM ISTLast Updated : 01 Mar 2011 11:50:52 PM IST
Altruism was far from Union finance minister Pranab Mukherjee’s mind when he announced a series of concessions in his budget speech. In fact, they were targeted at voters in the five states going to polls in a few months. Elections in Kerala, West Bengal, Assam, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry are crucial for the Congress. Any failure to retain or wrest these states would have disastrous consequences for the party’s prospects in the 2014 general elections. It is for this reason that he has, by and large, refrained from making a bid to generate additional resources by way of new taxes. Pranab knew that the best way to win the sympathy of voters in these states is to cater to the needs of important opinion-makers in the rural areas.
The lollipops offered to senior citizens, farmers, anganwadi staff and workers in the unorganised sector should be seen as his attempt to build new vote-banks. The doubling of wages for the anganwadi staff, increased old-age pension, liberalisation of the post-retirement scheme for workers in private companies and allocation of Rs 3,000 crore for the revival of cooperative textile mills are bound to benefit a large number of people. Though the benefits of the huge allocation for the agriculture sector may not percolate down to the farmers in the next few months, Pranab is shrewd enough to realise that the announcement would make a beneficial impact on them.
Though he has not announced any new aam aadmi schemes, larger funds have been earmarked for them like the rural job guarantee scheme. What’s more, the announcement that a law to ensure food security would be enacted this year is aimed at mollycoddling those who have been groaning under the weight of increased food prices. The calculation that the rural population would be able to reap the benefits of many of the concessions like, for instance, on fertiliser and the setting up of cold storages by the time the next general elections take place is clearly discernible in the budget. This should be seen against the backdrop of the widely-held belief that it was the employment guarantee scheme that helped the UPA return to power in 2009. However election-oriented the budget is, there is no guarantee that the voters would be swayed by it. Far more important for them is good governance on which count the UPA government has clearly failed.