The Union budget 2021, comes at a time when India concludes a rather gloomy year of face masks and social exclusion but also 50 years since bank nationalisation. Economist and former governor of the Reserve Bank of India Dr Duvvuri Subbarao feels time has come for the government to draw up a 10 year roadmap for withdrawal from public sector banking. However, not all agree, as we gather from the experts at an online meeting on Union Budget 2021.
That is not all. The pandemic and the migrant labour and the need for a coherent policy on urban poor is another area of deep concern needing suitable interventions. A deep dive into Indian consumer economy and how to make producers more productive is also a pressing issue. Finally, why fiscal concerns should not lead to policy flip flops on revenue mopping up measures and what should define the nature of government spending.
These and more issues were discussed at an online meeting organised by FE Online. Other than Dr Subbarao, there were Rama Bijapurkar, an independent consultant and a cross sectoral expert with deep insights on the consumer economy and Professor M S Sriram, chair at the Centre for Public Policy at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Bangalore and an expert on co-operative reforms, micro lending and on financial inclusion. The three experts are also well known authors.
Their views and deep subject insights matter at a time when the tasks before the budget is not just to boost growth, help recover the lost ground, as witnessed with the contractions in the last two quarter numbers of India’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) that has now put India technically in recession and the economy having to cope with deep economic scars at the end of a rather gloomy year.