Budget 2008-09: The burden of expectations
N. Ravi The challenge before the Finance Minister in preparing a pre-election budget is to balance the minimal tax sops needed to keep the markets in an upbeat mood with massive spending programmes that will find resonance with the electorate. Preparing for the election-eve budget, Finance Minister P. Chidambaram must have found the burden of expectations unusually high. Not only is he expected to provide the usual budgetary sops to please all but he is also called upon to correct the sense of drift that has come to mark the last one year of functioning of the United Progressive Alliance government and recapture the popular imagination. And this he has to accomplish without overly stretching either fiscal norms or his own credibility that will be called into question by a sudden show of solicitude at election time. Budgets are invariably characterised as pro-poor, pro-growth or pro-rich, depending on one's perspective and if such labels can normally be shrugged off, they become particularly critical at this time. In a sense, the Finance Minister will have to be riding the two horses of populism and fostering growth. For while this year's budget can be expected to lean heavily towards giveaways, it cannot ignore measures needed to sustain economic performance. True the mood of industry and the markets does not necessarily translate into the mood of the electorate as the National Democratic Alliance government found to its cost when its overdrawn