"Generous grants, compassion, righteous rule, and succour to the downtrodden are hallmarks of good governance."
The above lines of Saint Thiruvalluvar were used by the then Finance Minister P Chidambaram, to sum up his 2008 Budget proposals. Chidambaram had just announced one of the biggest poll-sop in the history of contemporary Indian politics.
In one full stroke, he wiped agrarian debt of 3 crore small and marginal farmers costing the exchequer more than Rs 60,000 crore. An additional sum had been set aside to help 1 crore farmers to clear their debt at concessional rates.
If Chidambaram's budget speech of 2008 would be remembered for farm loan announcements, PM Modi led NDA II government would be hoping to ride the new wave of 'Modicare' in seeking 'Ayushman' of a longer life from the electorate in 2019.
The biggest social sector push in this year's budget is towards public health.
'Modicare' aims to provide 10 crore poor families with Rs 5 lakh as an annual health cover. In its earlier avatar, the scheme provided for a cover of Rs 1 lakh per family per year.
Rural public health in India is in shambles. Cost of private healthcare is exorbitantly high rendering it inaccessible to a vast majority.
In offering affordable health to the poor -- both urban and rural -- the government has tried to reach out to 50 crore people across the country.
Being the last full budget of the Modi government, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley was expected to lay emphasis on the agrarian economy and rural sector as farm distress in 2017 has been widespread and intense.
By announcing government's intent to provide at least 50% profits on the farm produce through guaranteed purchase through Minimums Support Price (MSP), Jaitley has attempted to address BJP’s 2014 election promise of doubling farmer’s income. The government has targeted 2022 to reach this goal.
Kisaan is an all-encompassing amorphous term.
Our ancestors were farmers. Politics, however, engenders its own idiom aimed at electoral mobilization. For instance, Mulayam Singh Yadav, ahead of 2007 assembly polls in UP justified his alliance with his bete noire Kalyan Singh by calling it a union of farmers. Former Prime Minister H D Deve Gowda, after four decades in active political life, remains a humble-farmer.
The economics of the agriculture, however, has assumed a grim proportion. With land holdings shrinking, tilling for small and marginal farmers is no more a sustainable proposition.
Amidst urbanization and large-scale migrations, traditional agrarian communities are perhaps the only social groups which remain rooted to the villages. These groups are generally classified as intermediary castes in the social hierarchy. They are numerically dominant and politically assertive.
In his budget speech, Arun Jaitley has tried to reach out the shapeless mass of voters ahead of the general elections.
However, unlike a loan waiver which is more tangible and immediate, most of the announcements in NDA’s last full budget would depend on effective implementation at the ground level.
The proof of the pudding is always in the eating.
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