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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.

Faced with the challenge of bringing a turnaround in the economy and bridging the fiscal deficit, the Modi Government has shifted the usual focus of the annual budget from the regular sole allocation-oriented approach to attracting both domestic and foreign investment for implementation of its novel schemes. As the global economy is showing signs of improvement and Asia and the emerging economies are becoming favoured destinations for foreign direct investments (FDIs), India hopes to become a larger beneficiary.

LUCKNOW: Enthused by the grand success in Uttar Pradesh where party got 72 seats out of total 80 in Lok Sabha, BJP is now seriously pursuing the agenda to capture power in UP.

Is there any hope of the 16th Lok Sabha functioning well? The beginning of the budget session on Monday shows signs of the repeat of the 15th Lok Sabha when the government could not transact much business throughout and the house did not discuss and debate many serious issues. One hoped that with a stable government and a fractured opposition in place, the Parliament might function better.

Former strongman of Bihar Lalu Yadav is facing unprecedented crisis of his political career. The last Lok Sabha election was the last time for him to prove that he could stage a comeback after loosing Bihar Assembly Election of 2005. Since then his political fortunes measured in terms of electoral success has seen continuous and gradual decline.

The Modi Government is faced with the dual challenge of bringing an upturn in the economy by achieving a growth rate in the range of 5.4 per cent to 5.9 per cent and moderating the trend in price inflation.

The raw deal meted out to Kerala by the first railway budget presented by the Modi Government has touched off a wave of anger in the state.

After the new Government presents its budgetary proposals in the Parliament the Prime Minister Narendrabhai Damodardass Modi is slated to begin his engagements with the emerging economies of the world. Close cooperation among the emerging economies has become imperative as the world economy is yet to come out of the crisis that befell in August-September 2008.