Budget for real India

The biggest concern that comes to my mind when I think about the budget is the shameful neglect of the agriculture sector, farmers and the poor by the Government of India and by successive finance ministers of the country, though they all regularly pay lip service to the cause. Here, I present to you an ideal alternative budget that is genuinely dedicated to India, and its masses ufffd the poor.

In the Union Budget presented for 2010-11, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee had allocated a total of Rs 12,836 crore for agriculture, irrigation and allied activities. Add to it that fancy term 'rural development' and you get a total budget allocation of about Rs 67,000 crore. That is less than 15 per cent of the total funds allocated by the Finance Minister in 2010-11. And this is despite the stated concern of the UPA
government about the distress being faced by rural India, which is also the real India.

Rural India needs 150 million jobs to be created. As a committed government, our aim should be to do this in a span of 5 years and not 65 years. Thus, we have to create 30 million jobs a year. In rural India, a job still can be created by investing about Rs 33,750 per job. This would mean the necessity for an additional Rs 1 lakh crore per year. In my alternative budget, therefore, firstly, I would increase the allocation for the rural Indian, mainly farmers, by a straightforward Rs l,00,000 crore a year.

Poor in India live in cities too. So, I would suggest another Rs 1,20,000 crores to be allocated for 25 million jobs to be created for the urban unemployed. In urban India, the cost of creating a job dramatically multiplies to about Rs. 2,40,000 per head. Thus, to create 5 million jobs per year, we would require the amount I just mentioned.

I also want to focus on one burning issue of this year though it doesn't directly relate to the poor alone. Corruption. And the only solution for corruption is a functional judicial system. Optimum funds should be allocated to improve this segment too.

At the end, all I would like to say is that no one can deny that the Indian farmer and poor too need to share in the spoils of globalisation. What happens if farm productivity in India touches the level of China and the poor start getting purchasing power?

The truth of it all is that in the real sense, it is also going to benefit the corporate sector immensely. For, once the poor have purchasing power, it is the corporate sector which will reap the benefits like how the
Chinese corporations have been getting advantaged.

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