Budget over, poor ignored again

On the Union Budget day, while reacting to the proposals made on Ms Nirmala Sitharaman’s fiscal exercise, former Finance Minister P. Chidambaram rued that nowhere in her speech had the FM mentioned the words ‘unemployment’, ‘poverty’, ‘inequality’ or ‘inequity’.

Chidambaram may have his reasons for pointing out this ‘anomaly’ but the remark did serve as an eye-opener to the priorities the FM had topmost on her mind as she went about drafting the Budget and the poorest of the poor hardly figured among them. The Budget no doubt has brought huge relief to the middle class by announcing Income Tax exemption upto Rs 7 lakh per annum. The salaried lot are happy but then budgetary expectations are not restricted to only those who are lucky enough to receive a monthly salary.

There are several other categories of people-the elderly, farmers, handicapped, the young, children, workers in the unorganised sector and the urban and rural poor who cannot even dream of a roof over their heads. The state and the schemes it conceives to usher in some sort of hope and optimism into their deprived lives is all that these people can look for and they no doubt are those who deserve state support the most.

Unfortunately, in an age of growing privatisation and corporatisation where profit making rules over everything else including social concerns, the ranks of the poverty-ridden are steadily growing. And, as business entities go about announcing layoffs and tighten their belts amid fears of a looming recession, the glimmer of hope they had of making both ends meet amid a waning pandemic, is also fast disappearing. A day after the Budget, some rights groups have taken pains to point out how those who rightly deserved some kind of assistance, have been largely ignored.

Even allocations for the scheme for implementation of the (Rights of) Persons with Disabilities Act have been severely reduced by Rs 90 crores, from Rs 240.39 crore last year to Rs 150 crore this year, they said. The pension for the disabled remains unchanged at Rs 300 for more than a decade and covers a mere 3.8 per cent of the disabled population. No better is the plight of the elderly though the Income Tax cut could benefit them to a certain extent.

As an NGO working with them put it, most senior citizens are in the informal sector and are out of the tax bracket and living either close to or below the poverty line. What was needed was a blanket of social security schemes which would have benefitted them and that has conveniently been forgotten by the FM. Are children any better off after the Budget? They constitute more than a third of India’s total population but seem to have largely remained out of the budgetary radar.

In fact, there is a 0.05 percentage points decline in the share of allocation for the children in the Budget, say NGO sources. Nor is there any discernible attempt to reach out or improve the lot of vulnerable children reeling under the impact of poverty. The only saving grace - Ms Sitharaman has announced a National Digital Library for Children and Adolescents.

Clean drinking water, sanitation, health, education and nutrition are what most Indians long for as they are yet to gain access to these essentials even decades after Independence. Ours is no developed country with huge chunks of the population unaware of where their next meal will come from and perpetually gripped by the uncertainty over joblessness and food shortage. The Budget remains an empty promise for them.