Responding to Congress leader and former finance minister P Chidambaram’s “capitalist” jibe at the Union Budget 2022-23, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Wednesday called it a “certificate” from the grand old party. “For a party that claimed 1991 opened the world to say this was a capitalist speech is a certificate,” she said in an exclusive interview with Rahul Joshi, Group Editor-in-Chief, Network18.
The Union Budget unveiled by Sitharaman will be “rejected by the people”, the Congress said on Tuesday. The party’s senior leader P Chidambaram, who was the finance minister in the Manmohan Singh government, especially issued a sharp takedown, telling reporters that the Budget speech was the “most capitalist speech ever” and Sitharaman “has mastered the jargon of capitalist economics”.
“There was not a word about reviving MSMEs (small and medium industries) or on cutting indirect taxes… not a word on cash assistance to poor,” Chidambaram had told reporters, pointing out that in the last two years, millions of jobs have been lost. “There are worrying macro-economic indicators… every key subsidy has been slashed… people will reject this capitalist budget.”
Sitharaman assured that the target to achieve 8 per cent GDP growth in the next fiscal is achievable. If things go the way they are going now, gradually all sectors will come up, the finance minister said in the interview. She added that even the hospitality and contact-intensive sectors still require support and that has been provided for in the Budget. “So our understanding is if even those sectors revive as much as they would like to with support from government and the systems – banking and others – that is achievable,” she said.
During the interview, the finance minister also said that the government is committed to completing the disinvestment targets set in previous Budgets. The Centre earlier planned to privatise the Bharat Petroleum Corporation, Shipping Corporation of India, and a major stake sale in Container Corporation of India. “My commitment to last year’s Budget targets continues. There is a question of timing your disinvestment,” Sitharaman assured.
In Budget 2022, the finance ministry sharply cut the disinvestment target to Rs 65,000 crore for 2022-23. The divestment plan can not entirely depend on how the domestic or global stock markets are performing, she maintained. The minister said, “It’s not just the stock market that decides the timing. I have to take everybody on board as well.”
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