Budget 2021 to be a tougher balancing act than India’s other annual Budgets

A combination of stepped-up social spending – including on long-neglected healthcare – and a state-led infrastructure push will make the recovery both durable and inclusive

Union Budget 2021: India’s federal budget Monday will be a much tougher balancing act than New Delhi’s regular annual fiscal trapeze. For one thing, the pandemic has upset business-as-usual calculations of how much to spend, on what, and how to finance it. For another, an impatience to make up for lost time has to be weighed against a shrinking of policy space in emerging markets: A reprise of the 2013 global taper tantrum could compound the country’s considerable domestic challenges.

On the first question — how much to spend — Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman must simply do a lot more. Even with some loosening of the purse strings in the final months of the fiscal year that will end in March, Moody’s Investors Service affiliate ICRA Ltd. expects annual government expenditure to have been broadly unchanged from the Rs 30 trillion ($415 billion) estimated before the outbreak. The answer to what to spend on is being dictated by the fault lines that opened after India imposed one of the world’s harshest lockdowns. Without a safety net for workers badly affected by Covid-19, ongoing economic revival from the June quarter’s 24 per cent loss in real output could peter out for

lack of demand.

A combination of stepped-up social spending — including on long-neglected healthcare — and a state-led infrastructure push will make the recovery both durable and inclusive. A fifth of the 70 million-plus Indians who lost their services, manufacturing and construction jobs are either still working as farmhands or are unemployed. Discouraged, many have exited the labor force…

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