 Hello and welcome. You're watching us covering the budget 2021. We are going to try and analyze and find out what exactly is this great spending that Nirmala Sita Ramanji seems to be talking about. She apparently has said that she has spent, spent and spent and if we look at the data that the government has put out in the budget, it has said that spending has gone up sharply during the COVID period and that kind of spending should have really made us see not a V-shaped recovery but a rocket-shaped recovery. But we're going to look at that in detail. Has there really been spending? Because the fiscal deficit we know has apparently shot up to 9.5 percent. Spending had gone up sharply by about four or the lakh rupees, more than four lakh rupees than what was budgeted. Again, this year the fiscal deficit is going to go to 6.8 percent apparently because a lot is being spent. And if you are watching mainstream media since the morning, you would have seen the 10 out of 10 ratings. Some have said that this is the greatest budget since 1997. Some are saying it's the greatest budget in 30 years. We are going to try and look at this first, going to focus on the spending part of it. And I have with me Professor Arun Kumar. I have a senior economist, Chirashree Das Gupta. I have a foreign jai Gohar Thakurtha with me also on this show. So let me start with Professor Kumar first. When one looks at the spending, first I'm going to talk about the extra spending that was done supposedly during the COVID period. And if you just look at three heads, which is the money given to FCI, which was not being given all these years. Finally, the government seems to have decided that instead of asking FCI's food corporation of India to take loans to buy crops and then give the subsidies, it'll pay it from the budget. It apparently has done it this year itself. If I take that, if I take the additional fertilizer subsidy, we know which either has already been given or part of it will be spent now. And other than that, there's one more head. If we look at these three heads, then 93% of the additional spending is taken care of with just that. Again, if I look at this year's budget, then just the additional money being given to FCI and the additional interest payment, these take care of more than half the additional spending. So where is this fiscal stimulus coming from? And is there really a stimulus at all? Professor Kumar, I think you just have to unmute yourself. Yeah. So we need to look at the macro first. What is the macro situation? First time in a budget speech, the minister has not given the macro situation of the economy. The budget party always starts with what is the growth, what's the inflation, what's the balance of payment and so on is not there. And obviously, that is because the situation is rather grim. The government is assuming that the economy dropped by 7.7% in real terms. But actually, my understanding is it dropped by far more than that because the unorganized sector did very poorly. The government's understanding is that Q3 and Q4, the economies come back to almost where it was in 2019. Whereas we know that the unorganized sector unemployment is still very large. And secondly, the major components of the services sector have not come back online. For instance, whether it be airlines or hotels and restaurants, travel, tourism, et cetera. And services sector, the biggest component of the economy at 54%. So my understanding is the economy is still down by 10%. And therefore, this question of 7.7% decline is nowhere there. So the projections are based on the wrong assumptions about growth for this year and for the next year. So therefore, the revenue projections will be incorrect. And therefore, what is assumed as revenue is not likely to be there. And therefore, the fiscal deficit is likely to be even greater than 9.5%. So the fiscal problem is much greater than what the government is saying. And the public sector fiscal deficit is not included in this. And the states is not included in this. So the fiscal deficit for the public sector as a whole is running at roughly about 20%. Now, given all this, the government has therefore cut back on various social sector schemes. While it may have increased it on some, but it has cut back for the coming year on the rural employment guarantee scheme, cut back on various other schemes. Even on health, where the government says it's focusing, if you look at the budget, it has dropped from 84,000 crores to some like 75,000 crores or thereabouts. So it's even the health expenditure is going to come down because the government wants to curtail. Now, what's the implication of all this? The implication is that we needed to generate demand to boost growth. Now that boost to growth is not going to come because we're still at 34.5 lakh crores last year in revised estimate and 34.5 lakh crores this year. Now, if the 34.5 lakh crore of expenditure, your rate of growth is negative, then unless you raise the expenditures more, you're not going to get it. So therefore, my argument is that the government has not done what it needed to do, that is to pump in purchasing power into those who have got unemployed in the unorganized sector. PM Kisan has also come down from 75,000 crores by another 8,000 crores. So therefore, the point is that government needed to boost expenditures, boost investments so that the economy could come back online. That's not happening. And that is a worrying factor that is coming here also. Things are going to be pretty bad if the present trend remains. And when the fiscal deficit begins to rise, then they'll cut back on capital expenditure and they'll cut back on the social sector expenditures, which will again mean the demand will remain short. So I think we need to analyze the macro first and then go on to the separate sectoral aspects. So Paranjaya, first comments again on the macro picture. Do you accept what Professor Kumar is saying that the situation is much worse than what the government thinks? I would agree with him. How much worse I don't know. But the point is, I mean, he's absolutely correct. The Finance Minister has not talked about the macro numbers. But if we go by what was disclosed in the Economic Survey, once again, what we are seeing is more bluff and bluster. And this V-shaped recovery that they're talking about, that in nominal terms, the GDP growth in the coming financial year, the year that begins on the 1st of April, 2021 would be 15.4% and that according to the Economic Survey is the highest since independence. Now, these figures actually mean nothing, because if you look at what the government itself is saying, the contract... But interestingly, the budget doesn't seem to think it's 15.4%. If you look at it, the budget... I mean, I mean, these numbers are not magic. I mean, even if you go along with what the Economic Survey has said and you look the actual growth of the GDP according to the government, is less than 3% is barely about 2.5% because you're looking at a GDP which is low. The second point I think is, and that has already been made by Professor Arun Kumar, is that if you look at it in nominal terms, the total expenditure of the central government, if you look at the revised estimate for 2021 and the budget estimate for 2021-22, there's been almost identical. There's been no change. And the last point, and that I'm getting into sectors, and we can talk about agriculture and we can talk about healthcare, there's been this right up front, the finance minister made this... There's going to be apparently a huge rise in expenditure on healthcare through the tune of 137%. It's right up front in her budget speech. Now, you look at the numbers carefully. The revised estimates, the budget estimates, the Department of Medical and Public Health and look at issues like water supply, sanitation, Department of Health and Family Welfare, et cetera. Short point. The bulk of this increase is on account of the fact that the government intends spending 35,000 crores extra on vaccine, on COVID vaccines in the coming financial year. This is the single biggest component which has resulted in what appears to be a huge jump. Now, the economic services, you know, we're spending only 1% of our GDP on healthcare. We've been looking for decades on it. We should be spending 2%, 2%, 2.5%, we should be spending 3%. We are nowhere there. So, despite the claims about spend, spend, spend, much of it is just smoke and mirrors. It's just bluff and bluster. Please. Chirashree Das Gupta, let me bring you in for your first comments. Because in this speech, we heard the finance minister talk about how most money is going to be spent on Anganwadi's and she mentioned the portion Anganwadi and portion scheme which has been now renamed and made into Anganwadi and portion 2.4. This seems to be just a rehash of some older schemes and even here, the total allocation seems to have gone down. So, once again, it appears that some allocation in the health sector and when we talk about the gender budget, for instance, the gender budget appears to have dropped instead of going up. You'll have to unmute yourself, Chirashree. I think you're... Oh, sorry. The gender budget has gone down substantially. The total is 1.53 lakh crore, which is 0.4% of GDP. While last year, it was 1.06% of GDP. So, it's a very sharp fall there. And we must remember that the gender budget process in India is very flawed because it is always an overestimate because there are these two kinds of things that are done. One is where 100% spending is on women. The other is when 30% spending is on women. So, notionally, the government has anything that it doesn't have 100% spending. It assumes that it is spending 30%. So, any way the gender budget is always inflated. And even this inflated gender budget shows a huge cut. Now, coming to that portion of the scheme, they've merged a lot of schemes, ICDS, adolescent girls, national crush scheme, et cetera. Now, with that, the total allocation is 20% less, even after clubbing all these schemes than it was in 2020-21. The mid-day meal scheme has seen no increase. And so, what you... And the food subsidy, which is most important for the gender budget, has gone down by 42.5%. That's a huge cut. So, all of this and the LPG subsidy support is being cut by another 60%. So, in the overall macro picture where what we have had is not only huge amounts of unemployment, the LFPR shows how the unemployment really increased during the lockdown, but also what we have is people dropping out of the labor force. We also have a situation in which women's unpaid work burden is increasing. And in this situation, to slash the gender budget like this and overall allocations in social sector like this is going to be extremely detrimental for women and marginalized sections. So, Professor Kumar, coming back to the issue of spending, when you were talking about the macro issues and essentially what was required in a certain sense is... Your frame is frozen. I think we have lost Anindo. I think Anindo's frame is frozen. And while we are waiting for Anindo to resume, you know, I can just butt in and just try and supplement some of the points that you've made, Professor Arun Kumar, would you like to sort of elaborate and you know, when you look at the way the fiscal deficit is projected to go up 9.5%, would you not agree that essentially it is more on account of the fact that government revenue collections have come down or squeezed and not because the government is spending more? Would you agree with that? So, Anindo, while we were waiting for you, this is really... Yeah. Please go ahead, Paranth. So, you know, what has happened is that both revenues have got squeezed by about 5 lakh crores and expenditures have risen by about 4 lakh crores if you look at the overall expenditures. And here are the major items where increases have taken place is one is defence which was expected by about 20,000 crores. And then you have subsidies which have gone up by a very substantial amount both on food and on fertilisers. And then you have increased expenditure on the health sector from 67,000 crores to 82,000 crores, that's 15,000 crores increase. And then a very substantial increase in what is called rural development. I think that's where some of the schemes that the government started, they are probably clubbed under the rural development scheme. And then you have the, you know, the transportation. And I think that's probably because of the, you know, railways that were being run, et cetera, et cetera, to transport migrants, et cetera. So these are some of the major schemes in which large increases have taken place, you know. So the point is that is that enough to boost the economy? You know, obviously, in spite of 9.5% fiscal deficit which should have boosted the economy, in spite of that the rate of growth of the economy has not really picked up as much as it should have, you know. And that's where my point is that if you keep the expenditures at roughly 34 and a half lakh crores and make the fiscal deficit fall from 9.5% to 6. something percent, then how would you get a boost to economy? And therefore the rate of growth of the economy will not pick up as much as the government says it would pick up. So even though I agree that the next year's rate of growth because of the low base of the, this year will be high. So you'll have probably a 10% rate of growth or 10% percent rate of growth because of the low base. But the point is you'll not reach the 2019 level of GDP. So the GDP level will remain below 2019 and therefore the tax revenues that you'll collect will be less than what they were in 2019. And that's why my suspicion is that the fiscal deficit will again begin to rise in the coming year. And as that happens, they'll cut back on capital expenditures and they'll cut back on, you know, the discretionary expenses on social sectors. So therefore, you know, what should have been done, that will not get done. And in that case, the rate of growth of the economy will not pick up the way it should pick up. Ponja, I think that one of the things that is worth pointing out, and I'm coming back to that again and again, is perhaps you could unpack it a bit. Because when we look at something like FCIs, Dr. Kumar pointed out that a lot of money has been spent in 2020, in the last year during COVID, and is going to be spent as well, which is the food subsidy given to food corporation of India. Now, all these years, food corporation of India was being told that buy crops, pass it on to the PDA system to the ration system, whatever is your cost, you have to borrow from NSS and other places. And that borrowing was ballooning and it had gone up to 3.3 lakh crore by the end of the previous fiscal. It appears that the government has paid up some of that and is also increasing the payment that it's doing. So in a sense, perhaps that is not additional expenditure at all, it was just dues that FCI had, which has been given to it. Because if it has 3.3 lakh crore of things that it was supposed to receive from the government, the government ended up spending 3.4 lakh crore this year, instead of 78,000 crore, it had initially said it would. So that additional amount is essentially the core of what the additional expenditure has been. Mandrega is a big expenditure, let me try and unpack these things to you. You rightly pointed out that the government is clearly realized that you cannot continue, I mean it's just not sustainable, where you have the food corporation of India continuing to borrow and that too from the national small savings fund. I mean it is clear that you cannot, I mean the increase in the revised estimate on the total government expenditure is largely because you have to discontinue, you have discontinued this kind of borrowing, which in any case you can argue was not required in the first place. Be that as it may, let's look at the issue of food subsidies. Now in comparison to the budget estimate of 1,15,570 crores, total budget estimate for the current financial year, it's gone up substantially to 4,22,618 crores in the revised estimate, that's more than three and a half times, almost four times. But when you look, compare the budget estimate of the current financial year to the budget estimate of the following year, you actually see a fall, you actually see a fall of more than 42%. Now that means the government, you are saying okay because there was a lockdown and because you are giving the PM Qeeshan scheme and giving free food, you don't want to continue along those lines. So that's in my opinion a very, very short-sighted kind of a policy because distress in the rural areas, I mean not a mention, I mean the economics survey didn't talk about migrant workers, not in the budget of Nirmala Sita Ramanji, there was not a mention of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. I mean the point is if you compare in 2021, what was the actual expenditure and compared to what you budgeted for, yes, you went up, of course you went up. The revised estimate went up from 71,000 crores, 71,686 crores to 110,000 crores in the revised estimate. But next year, what are you planning to do? You're going to go back exactly where you are, just a marginal increase. So in other words, the government seems to at one level, you're not talking about spend, spend, spend and yet it seems to be most reluctant to spend on that which could create jobs, which would help livelihoods. The economics survey talked about saving lives, what about livelihoods? I mean so these are all kind of clearly indicate the mindset of the government and your fiscal deficit is going up largely because your revenue collections are coming down and this is happening despite the huge increases that has happened in the price of petrol and diesel and I could unpack some of those numbers for you if you look at the budget estimate, compared to the budget estimate of corporate tax, corporate income tax and personal income tax, it's been false. I mean there's actually been a decline if you compare budget estimate 2021 with budget estimate 2122 and you look at GST collections also. If you look at the collection estimate of the revised estimate of 2021 and it is actually 25% less than the budget estimate and if you look at central excise it's gone up. Now the revenue secretary and the finance minister says that the additional sess on petrol and diesel is not going to affect prices. Look your prices are already sky high, it's about to touch 100 in certain parts of the country and what have you done? Okay you're not increasing this 2.5% sess on petrol and 4% on diesel so you're saying it's not going to affect consumer prices but what is going to happen? You're going to squeeze the state governments because excise duty has to be shared. You're increasing the sess and that's going to accrue to the union government. So these are the sort of games you're trying to play to boost your revenues. So this entire process by which the center appears to be raising its share of how much it's going to keep off tax revenues for instance. If one looks at it in the previous year the budget estimate of 2021 the states were supposed to get about 32.5% of the tax revenues that the government was collecting. The center was collecting was supposed to be transferred to the state. The previous year if you look at the actuals again more than 32.5% about nearly 33%. One third of what the government was collecting, center was collecting was going to states and this year that has been reduced to 30%. So clearly states are getting much less than what they were supposed to because of the way the architecture of this entire system has been created. Some structural aspects to this which I would like to talk about a little bit. So if you see that once GST was implemented the centralization of the taxation system became such that states became totally because they lost their revenue raising powers at the state level. They became totally dependent on central grants and the share from the tax pool. Now increasingly what is happening is on one hand this year the tax pool has as you rightly said it's reduced by about 40,000 crores the devolution to the states and on the other hand what has happened is that more and more of the schemes which are partly funded by the center partly funded by the states the burden of financing is being passed on to the states and the center is withdrawing from financing those. So what you have is on one hand more pressure on the states to increase their expenditure and on the other hand taking away their resource raising capacities. Now at the same time the FRBM acts have been imposed on the states through tight grants so if they don't implement the FRBM very strictly they don't get grants. So you will see in the last many years about 10 years if you see the record the fiscal deficit targets have been achieved mostly by the states because they are under tremendous pressure to compress expenditure and on the other hand the central government is giving up its responsibility and that same trend continues in the present budget. In fact in the speech itself I think the finance minister gave herself or gave the center time till 2024-25 to bring the fiscal deficit below four percent but I think as told states that they will still have to bring it there's down to below three percent by next year. Exactly and the other thing I just wanted to put a brief comment in is about the revenue side of the budget because I think this is also structural so if you see today in India for every hundred rupees of value that is produced in the manufacturing sector just one rupee eight paisa goes to labor so the share of labor in the total creation of value has gone down dismally. Now what you see is at the same time if you look at the wage surplus distribution what used to be in the mid 70s 65 percent of the value used to go to wages and 35 percent to surplus today it is just the opposite 35 percent goes to wages when 65 percent goes to the surplus out of which profits are made and one of the important features of this pandemic and the recession has been that despite all the hardships that have been faced by labor the brand has been faced by labor in terms of unemployment and labor space but nothing has affected the profitability of the corporate sector the profit share continues to increase and in such a situation to give further tax rebates further tax incentives further tax cuts to the big corporate sector at the cost of the entire country is something that points to the class basis of this government in terms of becoming solely the agent of the big corporate sector both domestic and international in terms of the if you see the incentives that have been given to the international financial companies as well as the tax cuts that have been given in this budget to the domestic big to domestic big business. Let me take that up with Professor Kumar you know if I look at the budget estimates then it's assumed that income tax collections will go down by about 12 percent compared to last year's estimates right and corporate tax collections will go down by 20 20 percent so the clearly the government believes that corporates will pay less tax than they had estimated last year but income tax will go down by just 12 percent now is there a case that at the bottom of the income tax you know if I break it up into people who pay tax up to 1.5 lakh rupees in a year because that is what we have the data that we have from the income tax assessment year of 2018-19 those who pay between 1 rupee to 1.5 lakh rupees account for nearly 88 percent of all taxpayers those are paid tax and they make up about 20 percent of all they account for about 20 percent of the total tax and if the government had given up that tax it would have cost them about 75,000 crore odd even if they've given them a bit of a thing let's say it would have cost them 40,000 not give up the entire tax was there a case to give some relief to that bottom part of the taxpayer because we know from CMI data that white-collar workers have lost jobs or have taken pay cuts in a huge number so you know my take always is that we must reduce indirect taxes and raise direct taxes you know because indirect taxes are regressive direct taxes are progressive so every time you cut taxes the well-off sections benefit so even though the lower segments benefit but if you look at the expenditure pattern bulk of the tax that is paid the indirect taxes are paid by the bottom 90 percent you know because it falls on everything so I think you know what the what is required for the economy and for the you know the poor people is that indirect taxes should be cut so GST should be reduced whereas direct taxes should be raised more people should be brought into the direct tax net at the moment as the prime minister in his august 15 speech said only 15 million people are effective taxpayers those who pay substantial amount of tax now in in a population of 1.38 billion if only 15 million are paying effective taxes that's about 1.1 percent you know so we need to raise direct taxes and cut indirect taxes so I'd say GST needs to be rationalized GST has a fundamental problem that it impacts the unorganized sector and it benefits the organized sector so demand has shifted from the unorganized sector to the organized sector and that's why the unorganized sector is in a crisis you know I'll quote to you the pressure cooker industries chairman who's made a statement two years back that we are growing at 24 percent because the unorganized sector and the pressure cooker industry is not able to cope with the GST and that is because GST is very complicated and therefore out of the 1.32 crore people who have registered under GST only about 85 lakh file return and of that also 5% pay 95% of the tax and 95% pay 5% of the tax so I think you know we need to completely reform GST we need to raise direct taxes you know whether it be income tax or corporation tax but what is clear is the government is trying to make some companies very big so monopolies are emerging whether it be telecom whether it be in ports whether it be in you know the airports etc so they are trying to make some companies very big you know and that's where I think crony capitalism is coming in and you know other companies are going to go down now the problem that we are facing in terms of taxation today okay that is something that we have to have reform of simplify the taxes whether it be GST or simplify the direct taxes whether it be income tax or corporation tax you know so that people cannot get away the more complex the taxes the more the black income generation so we need to simplify that now there's another point that I'd like to make in this context and which is that the center share of taxes you know as has been rightly pointed out by Farhan Joy you know that's not coming up to 42 percent because of the cesses etc that are levied and the center therefore manipulates you know how the cesses will be and what other taxes will be so the states share come down so states have a double whammy a their GST collection has gone down and then the center's share of what they were supposed to get that has gone down so that's why the states are in deep trouble and that's where bulk of the social sector expenditures take place so the social sector expenditures suffer therefore the employment generation suffers you know because education health drinking water these are the employment generating schemes so when you set up you know these kind of schemes and increase the expenditure then employment will go up but the government is talking about large infrastructure whether it be in railways or it be in roads etc but those are not employment intensive you know they may be using more cement and steel but not employment earlier you could see in a road project hundreds of people working now you see five people working with big bulldozers and big machines so what you need to do is big a big local infrastructure that's where this budget has another problem that not only manregas going down but no no scheme which will increase employment in urban areas and the kind of infrastructure it's talking about will not be very employment intensive so you need to generate employment pass on income to the poor people they'll do the expenditures they'll spend the entire amount if you give it to the upper classes they will mostly save it therefore the increase in expenditure will not take place therefore demand will not rise and therefore the rate of growth will not rise in fact I think that there's one of those schemes which is part of urban employment which was introduced last year allocation to that has been actually got has been reduced I think it's a PM or urban employment Yojana something like that the allocation has been reduced I want to move track a little bit for enjoy and ask you one thing that you know the rate at which we are planning the government is planning to privatize companies and if one looks at it 1.75 lakh crore that is what they want to get from this investment this year I know that this is this could be a tall claim because we've seen that happen two years ago 65,000 crore was what they'd budgeted got 50,000 crore last year it was 2.1 lakh crore they're going to end up with 32,000 crore only made about 15,000 till now next year 1.75 lakh crore another I would say 25-30,000 crore is probably dividends from public sector unit so if you look at this space that alone accounts for about 1% of GDP now once they've sold all the family silver every public asset what are they going to do about generating income to fix this fiscal deficit you know you are absolutely right on in doing this isn't keeping with the economic ideology of the present government I mean everything about the public sector is bad therefore privatize earlier you would say disinvest now you don't even use that word it's privatization and look what you've done so far you had an extremely ambitious target for the current financial year which was 2.1 lakh crores and as you rightly pointed out your revised estimate is saying 32,000 crores I mean you are it's barely 15% or about somewhere there what you want now you can say a bad bad state of the economy why how come your share markets are still booming yeah now in the budget estimate you've reduced that target from 2.1 lakh to 1.75 lakh crore what are you trying to do then you've not been able to go ahead with the privatization of air India with Bharat Petroleum with container corporation and then you want to add to that for one Hans and IDBI bank and shipping corporation I mean let me give you another spin to that story you want to there's a proposal to have an initial public offering of the shares of life insurance corporation now if that happens so far the life insurance corporation has been contributed to your disinvestment earnings because it has been buying up the shares of other public sector undertakings so it was really money from moving from one pocket of the government to the other government so despite their kind of ideological obsession with privatization being the solution to all your problems you're not even able to do that because you're sort of ignoring the reality on the ground you can have a stock market bubble which is helping a few companies or corporate conglomerates owned by these oligarchs or the crony capitalists but that does not reflect either the health of your economy or the health of the corporate sector and even as as professor Arun Kumar rightly pointed out even when you're spending on infrastructure you seem to be doing so with a sort of a political gain in mind I mean you look at the road projects and the proposed expenditure of the roads project this seem to be a lot of it focused on states which are going which are going to have an assembly elections Tamil Nadu Kerala Assam West Bengal and you know I want to make another point and that's about agriculture you know we have today lakhs of farmers who are agitating on the outskirts of the national capital you know the story better than anybody else it's been two months you've shut down the internet but what are you doing in the budget for them I mean you talk a lot about the farmers what have you done in the budget your allocation for agriculture if you compare budget estimate 2021 with budget estimate of 2021-22 there's actually in nominal terms of fall of about 8 percent now look at the PM Kisan scheme professor Arun Kumar had pointed out you had a budget allocation of 75,000 crores the actual expenditure is lower by about 10,000 crores and that's where they're saying that apparently it's because West Bengal has not given its names and some states have not given their names so they didn't spend but that's the question that since the BJP believes it's going to win West Bengal elections very soon then they shouldn't have allocated the additional 10,000 crore this year and then why have they retainted at 65,000 crore why have they reduced yeah and considering they're sure to be winning West Bengal and then everyone will be getting PM Kisan there then they should they should account for it and one small point you know you're once again repeating what is at best half truth and perhaps a downright lie about the minimum support price which is one of the big areas of contention in the farm laws now Nirmala Sitaraman like a predecessor Arun Jaitley you are claiming that the minimum support price is 50 percent of the cost of production that's your calculation you've decided you're going to have a particular way of calculating it it's A2 plus family labor that's supposed to be a cost of production which is very very different from what the Swaminathan committee had had had suggested you may not agree with it but in a sense once again you're trying to make claims which are not just born in my reality and even in the case of the farmers you know you talk a lot you're talking about that we will put the farm laws on hold for one and a half years you're going to put it out in a legally make it I mean we're going to say in writing we'll have the MSV but none of this gets reflected in your budget and if I can add one last point and I know I've been talking a lot and this is more about the state the macroeconomies and this I go back to the economic survey now claims suddenly the economic survey claims that the current account that is the balance of payments you are going to have a surplus after 17 years now as if it's such a great thing you're seeing a farm exchange reserves at a record high of over 580 billion US dollars in early January as if it's such a great thing no it's actually reflecting the terrible state of your economy because your exports have shrunk by 5.8 percent according to the economic survey but your imports have come down even more by over 11 percent 11.3 percent so you talk about a budget like never before you talk about spend spend spend but the hard numbers the figures tell you a very very different story. Okay I have one final question for Chirashree there and I'm going to read out something here which says that Morgan Stanley has raised its December 21 Sensex target to 55,000 from 50,000 it had said that by December 2021 they expected Sensex to hit 50,000 and they've now raised it to 55,000 after the budget and this is crucial because you're talking about the share of what goes to capital and what goes to labor here is what Morgan Stanley has to say and I'm quoting here if executed well this budget has potency to lift share of corporate profits in GDP augmenting the corporate tax rate cuts in September 19. Ogres well for a new private investment cycle recovery in local equity flows and EPS growth so Morgan Stanley is also betting that corporate profits share in GDP is actually going to go up thanks to this budget your comments on that Chirashree. Okay so see they didn't know the real picture they know what's been happening in the last six to seven years and the fact that corporate profits have kept increasing the share of corporate profits have kept increasing despite the slowdown despite the recession and despite the pandemic and so they're not wrong in project being optimistic about the share market but also in the specifically about the budget if you see that there are two aspects one is that there is been a large amount of tax exemption which has been given to foreign financial companies for portfolio financing okay there's also certain announcements about the tax audit ceiling being raised there's also announcements about tax defaulters not being chased for the moratorium on tax defaulters being extended so all of this together no doubt will be welcomed by the financial markets and hence they will feel optimistic about it but on the other hand if you look at it apart from the agriculture sector which foreign Joe has discussed in great details there are two things that are worth noting the first is that if you take away the expenditure on vaccination then the health budget has actually fallen by 8000 crores okay if you and that too in the middle of the pandemic so the what is basically needed which is in terms of like increasing our health infrastructure at the phc level there is no investment for that at all in the no planning for that if you look at the education budget the overall education budget has fallen by 8% and higher education budget has fallen by 2% and if you know you must be knowing that students for example since the start of the lockdown have been denied the scholarships until now the government has not really paid them scholarship these are ways of expenditure management to bring down the fiscal deficit so it is farmers it is workers it is students who are paying the price for the government's uh uh uh walk fiscal management ideas and it is the corporate sector which is benefiting from it it's very clear so instead of saying that this is a spend spend spend budget one would say that this is a privatized privatized privatized budget thank you so much for joining us even the way they are planning to just one small point how they're planning to manage the fiscal deficit 1.7 lakh crores from public sectors selling the family jewels which anyway has been commented upon the rest is solely market borrowings gross borrowings of about 8000 crores and market borrowings of about sorry gross borrowings of 12 lakh crores and market borrowing of 80,000 crores so this is the so borrow and sell that is the main motto of the budget Anandya there's also one yes which is yes you know the asset monetization you know public sector land railways all that monetization you know if you combine all that together in a period when incomes are low how would you monetize successfully unless you absolute prices you know and that's where I think you know asset prices can drop so I had a piece in the wire a little while back pointing out that if you did all this then asset prices will drop and the share market will then drop so I think the supply side responses that the government is trying for those will succeed only if the short run is taken care of if the short run is not taken care of properly then the long run also will not get taken care of and then the stock market would also probably collapse after a while because the P ratios have become very high you know so I think it's a very tricky situation financial systems are very unstable at the moment sorry about you know thank you thank you so much for thank you so much for joining us we've run out of time I'm sure that over the next few days we'll all be going through those papers and find a lot of more fine print no papers on in the no papers no papers no papers portable documents we'll be going through the portable documents and probably find more in the fine print and we'll keep coming back to you watch this space thank you so much for joining us thanks a lot