India Looks to Boost Growth With New Budget

NEW DELHI (Christian Science Monitor) — India's finance minister announced the government's new budget on Saturday, promising a slew of measures that attempt to balance welfare spending with high economic growth and infrastructure development, while vowing to keep a tight control on the fiscal deficit.

Date: 28 February 2015 - 21:36

News ID: ۱۱۵۰۱

It was Finance Minister Arun Jaitley's first full budget since Prime Minister Narendra Modi won a huge majority in national elections in May on the back of promises to turn around the economy and boost job creation.
There were few sweeping reforms that the government has been promising, but economists and business leaders reacted to Saturday's announcement with cautious optimism, a far cry from Jaitley's first interim budget in July, which was widely panned.
"It's a very positive budget. No big bang, but a steady move forward," Ajay Shriram, president of the Confederation of Indian Industries, told CNN-IBN. "It's moving in the right direction."
Jaitley said the Indian economy is slated to grow at 7.4 percent in the current fiscal year, which ends in March, and will continue grow at between 8.1 and 8.5 percent in the next year.
"The credibility of India's economy has been re-established," Jaitley told Parliament in a 90-minute speech. "India is about to take off on a faster growth trajectory once again."
New growth estimates announced in late January make India the world's fastest-growing economy, surpassing neighbor and rival China. But the higher growth projections follow a revision of the baseline against which India calculated economic growth.
India's annual growth averaged about 8 percent in the decade up to 2010, but slumped to about 5 percent in the following years.