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Good beginning but needs to be worked on India’s financial sector is undergoing a transformation currently and Arun Jaitley’s first budget has sought to address some of the issues upfront.

The fact that sectarian sentiments based on caste or region or religion are not as deeply rooted as is common supposed but are really bubbles on the surface of the country’s political life becomes evident every time there is a wave of sort on the eve of an election.

KOLKATA: Once more, political opinion in Bangladesh is sharply polarised on the critical issues governing Indo-Bangla relations in South Asia.

With the anointment of Amit Shah as the national president of BJP, Narendra Modi has consolidated his grip on his party. It is a fact that Modi’s emergence as the top leader of his party was not uncontested. He had to face a lot of opposition and resistance from within his own party to emerge as the Prime Ministerial candidate of NDA. Many people seen supporting him were in fact helping him only to make use of his popularity for electoral gain and they would have ditched him, had NDA and BJP not got the majority in parliament.

Anointment of Amit Shah as the BJP President signals a change in the dynamics within the BJP. With this change, hold of Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the organization is complete. Now he holds sway both over the government and the party and there is no one to challenge his authority. Also, both Shah and Modi need not be as amenable to diktats from Nagpur as the previous party presidents and Prime Ministers have been. This will mean a recalibration of the relationship between the RSS leadership and the party’s.

The federalism that exists in the Indian Union is federalism only in name. The meagre powers that constitutionally exist in the hands of the state government are continually encroached upon by New Delhi, sometimes by issuing directives, framing ‘guidelines’, attaching riders and conditions to different schemes and by transferring subjects from state list to concurrent list. Most shamelessly, this destruction of the democratic principle is done in the name of a threatened security or a fledgling economy.

BHOPAL: Strange things are happening in Madhya Pradesh. In a rare spectacle, accusing fingers are being raised both at the Governor and the Chief Minister. When asked to comment on the charges being levelled against him, Governor Ramnaresh Yadav, in an angry tone, declared that he was prepared to be hanged if the allegations were found to be true. While the Governor announced his readiness to die, Chief Minister Shivraj Singh declared that, “I will take sanyas if a single allegation is proved”.

The Railway Budget 2014-15, presented by the Union Minister of Railways, Sadananda Gowda in the Lok Sabha on July 8, 2014, seeks to link Indian Railways to the market economy, making a course correction in the hitherto continuing treatment of it as a social welfare outreach by the successive Governments of India.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has followed Nike’s most inspiring line for the sports world, Just Do It, as the guiding spirit behind his and the NDA II’s first national budget. Arithmetically, the size of the Modi government’s expenditure budget in the first year is Rs. 17,95,000 crore. The government budget is all about the annual government expenditure and allocations. Revenue is raised to meet the expenditure target. The revenue gap or deficit, then, met with borrowings, domestic or overseas. Jaitley has promised fiscal prudence and to try to live within the means, cutting on borrowings and also subsidies. For instance, the petroleum sector subsidies are to be compressed by Rs. 20,000 cr. and the government spending on MNREGA, the UPA’s pet rural employment generation programme, may be much less as it will be specifically linked to agriculture related activities. The government will not treat social sector spending as ‘doles’. It will be linked to tangible asset creation. “We can’t leave a legacy of debt for our future generations,” the finance minister said and left a major portion of the task to grow the economy to the corporate sector and entrepreneurs, local and foreign. The government has opened up the economy, wide.

To expect a government in the saddle of less than two months to come out with a vision document and a perfect book-keeping exercise to run the economy for the rest of the inaugural year is to ask for the moon, given the entrenched disabilities a high-cost economy like ours suffers from. Yet, the maiden budget presented in Parliament on Thursday by the Finance Minister Mr. Arun Jaitley who wears several hats and a man Friday for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the feat turned out to be facile as his grasp on the nuts and bolt issues is second to none of the so-called experts and economists. Even as his first budget contained several customary projects, programmes of the past and the ones he sets forth, the 2014-15 Budget’s due emphasis on fiscal and growth impulse factors are refreshingly path- breaking to offer hope that the economy’s turnaround in the next couple of years is after all not that intractable as it had been in the past couple of years.