Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented the Interim Budget 2024-25 on Thursday, February 1, following the commencement of the Budget Session. Prime Minister Modi applauded the budget, noting a historic high investment of ₹11,11,111 crore for capital expenditure. PM Modi highlighted India's favorable capex and infra spending situation, foreseeing numerous job opportunities for the youth in the coming years. We talked with Avani Kapur of CPR India to under the budget 2024 Indepth. Stay Tuned on Oneindia English for all budget related queries.
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00:00 Talking about opportunities and young faces, Avni Kapoor joins us on the broadcast to lead
00:06 accountability initiative CPR India. Avni can be reached at the rate avni_kapoor, at the rate
00:12 acc initiative and also at the rate cpr_india. Avni, thank you so much for speaking to us,
00:20 good to see you today. How are you? Thanks Pankaj, nice to be here. Budget day is always
00:26 an exciting day. It is, it is, trust me. I mean and I can equally you know reciprocate the idea
00:33 while the newsroom is buzzing, I can understand the you know the industries, the corporate sector,
00:38 all the government centers, MSMEs, SMEs, all of them are upbeat. How do you see it Avni? Tell us
00:46 first of all your initial reactions to the budget, whether it stood tall on your expectations or not
00:51 and later on we would definitely come and understand from you what is accountability
00:56 initiative CPR India but first your reactions on the budget. So to be honest I'm always measured
01:01 when it's on vote on account. So I don't really take the budget numbers that seriously because
01:07 they are going to be changing in July. For me I think budgets generally give a sense of
01:14 the priority of the government and whether what is the kind of policy stance that the government
01:19 is taking and I think this budget seems to be following the stand that the government has been
01:24 taking. I think there's been nearly a three times increase in capital expenditure since 2019-20
01:30 and I think the path of growth has been focused on capital expenditure. As someone that's been
01:38 working on the social sector I think always I guess it's always a toss-up. I think one of the
01:46 things that I was hoping that the budget will address not necessarily in terms of allocations
01:50 but definitely at least mentioned is the rural distress. I think the hope that capital expenditure
01:57 is a multiplier for growth, we're waiting to see the effect of that in rural areas and was surprised
02:05 that the allocations for NREGA for instance have remained stagnant. We were looking at the numbers
02:12 recently already 264 crore person days of work have already been generated under NREGA and we
02:19 still have two months left in the fiscal year. In fact if you look at the expenditure we've already
02:25 spent more than even the revised estimates as well as the new budget announcements but
02:30 I guess you have to do a balancing act and I think the focus has been on a lot of the capital
02:36 expenditure as opposed to some of the human development indicators whether it's health, nutrition,
02:43 education. Absolutely, I mean also a lot of emphasis has been put on the women
02:51 workforce. So you yourself have been working towards the upliftment and also
02:59 keeping a close eye on the data and statistics. How do you see for a country of 1.4 billion
03:06 and half of the population being women, how best the resources can be harnessed and
03:13 how it can be put to a best use and do you believe that the government has been at its
03:20 job when it comes to women empowerment? I think I'm still traditional and old school where I strongly
03:26 believe that focusing on human capital formation and human development is going to be critical.
03:32 Recently the annual status of education report came out and this time it was beyond basics
03:37 focusing a little bit on secondary education adolescent care. I think the finance minister
03:44 did talk about significant increase in women in higher education but the numbers and government's
03:50 own numbers talk about the fact that while in secondary education I think women still lag
03:55 behind significantly. I think the survey had this number of 24% female students in the
04:02 age bracket of 14 to 18 could not read a grade two level text. So I'm still old school, I think
04:09 that the government has come up with some innovative schemes. There was that focus on
04:15 LPG, there was a focus on trying to ensure that the new housing is directed towards women
04:22 at least the ownership but I think that what's got missed out in the process is the focus of
04:28 maternal health, the focus on nutrition and the focus on education and those are really important
04:34 for women empowerment as well. Right, one critical aspect Avneem, may I ask which
04:43 part of country you are in? Are you in Delhi? When we talk about metropolitan cities
04:51 especially tier one cities, the emphasis or the media gamut that is based here
04:58 at times refers to the urban side of the budget but the rural aspect if you travel to the hinterlands
05:06 of Bihar to Uttar Pradesh to Maharashtra for that matter to Gujarat to a certain extent, these are
05:12 successful models of governance in the country yet they leave a lot of scope of improvement.
05:19 How do you see an interim budget or a general budget catering to that need or is it more that
05:26 is required to be done on the microcosmic level at the grassroot level or are we doing just fine?
05:32 Personally, I think like I said, I think we need to focus, there is rural distress going on.
05:38 There was a big rise and one of the metrics for it for us that we were looking at is just like
05:44 the rise and of demand for work in the rural areas. I think covid, Nalegaon was a big safety net during
05:51 covid and so of course you saw a big increase in demand and you see that you would have imagined
05:57 that post covid it would have fallen significantly but it hasn't so. So to me that does raise some
06:04 questions. At the same time, wage rates have been pretty stagnant and that's worrying. So in an
06:11 ideal situation, you would imagine that if there was no rural distress, you would see a lot more
06:18 productivity, you would see less demand for Nalegaon, you would see greater large number of people
06:24 still moving to urban areas and I think that the fact that Nalegaon which is of course one of the
06:31 largest social security schemes of the country and a great one at that, you still see a lot of demand
06:38 and yet both agricultural wages but also Nalega wages haven't kept pace. So that does raise some
06:44 question marks for me. I think what the pandemic did was a focus on food security which was definitely
06:52 important and you saw this big increase in PDS and I think that was a great initiative
06:58 that was taken but how to ensure that you can't just be giving free food grain alone, you need
07:05 to ensure that employment is productive and how do you ensure productive employment even in rural
07:11 areas. So I do think that more can always be done for rural areas, it will be different from
07:18 what is required in urban areas but I think we do need to address the rural distress.
07:24 Absolutely, your views and your assessment is well respected, well received also
07:32 and Avni comes from Centre for Policy Research and it's a 50-year-old institution engaged in
07:40 policy formation guiding the government and the non-government sector if I'm not wrong
07:45 in order to formulate their policies, how the impact goes deep down to the very last mile.
07:51 Avni, one final question, you are the lead accountability initiative CPR, Centre for Policy
08:00 Research in India. If I may be very direct with you, your assessments with the hard work that you
08:06 and your team put in vis-a-vis the transformation of it on the ground level through the government
08:14 policies, do you see it more in a better implementation, in a better fashion
08:22 now or is it still a lot to be done to actually translate the findings into reality through governance?
08:31 So to be completely honest, I think often what is missing and this is true for across governments is
08:39 we don't actually know what's happening on the ground. When we started the accountability
08:43 initiative, we started tracking the flow of money and looking at outputs and outcomes on the ground
08:49 because that information unfortunately was not publicly available and is still not publicly
08:55 available. If you look at the MIS systems of a lot of the schemes, you can see that there is progress
09:03 happening, a lot more money is flowing and it's flowing on time but the extent to which that's
09:08 actually leading to outputs and outcomes, there aren't enough metrics for it and so I think in my
09:15 final pitch, it would be the government has been doing a great job of putting budgets online,
09:20 both state governments and the union government. I wish we could have a lot more statistics and
09:26 data online for researchers like us to actually answer that question of how much of these policies
09:32 are actually translating to welfare on the ground. You hear anecdotal evidence, you have small
09:38 surveys but there'll never be enough and this country has scale as such as ours. So from our
09:46 surveys, we see mixed results across schemes, some schemes do well. I think the second we're doing
09:51 things on very mission mode, simple tasks tend to be definitely more productive but the second
09:58 you're trying to transform the country, it requires actually having data to track that progress. So my
10:05 pitch would be, let's have more data and discussion on what's happening on the ground. For now, I think
10:12 what we can say is, there's been transformation in terms of a lot more capital assets being
10:20 built on the ground to the extent to which they translate into actual outcome and employment
10:26 remains to be seen. Well indeed, Avani, much respect to your work, to your team's work, to CPR's work
10:35 here from our side because why I asked this question was for a very simple reason and nowadays
10:42 it appears to be a cliche that there was a time when former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi had admitted
10:47 that if the central government sends 100 rupees for the development of villages, only 20 rupees can be sent.
10:53 That is, only 20 rupees out of 1 rupee and then it remains between 300 and 400 rupees.
10:58 But this government has made it a point and they have quoted this incident saying that now
11:04 direct benefit transfers and many such initiatives will benefit the people.
11:15 That's why you are the bridge in between, you are the ones who actually tell the government,
11:20 the eyes and ears of the government that hey look, these are the numbers, these are the figures and
11:24 these are the issues and hence my question has been added that how positive has it been since
11:30 the time we have seen previous governments performing. Avani, thank you so much. One final
11:35 question, I can't let you go that you told us in the beginning that you don't trust
11:39 budget numbers. Fine, but from a populist budget to I wouldn't say political but
11:46 how should I say it, a budget, do you see it as a populist one or do you see it as
11:56 an okay budget one, if I may ask. So one clarification, I trust budget numbers.
12:02 I don't take the interim budget numbers that seriously because as I think the finance
12:08 minister also said this is a vote on account. I think what was interesting for me was that
12:14 there were no big policy announcements and that makes sense because it is an interim budget. So I
12:22 have no problems with the fact that there was no big, I think last election year PM Kisan was
12:29 announced this year, you didn't have the same populist announcements and so I think it was
12:36 more of a budget just trying to bring together some of what it has been trying to do. So the
12:41 focus on trying to create a reform economy, trying to it didn't mention all the dbt measures that it's
12:48 doing and the focus on capital expenditures. So for me it's pretty much a synthesis of some of
12:54 what they have been, the policy direction that the government has been taking rather than
12:59 necessarily very big bang policy announcements. I still I'll take it as a thumbs up.
13:04 Lovely, lovely, nice speaking to you. Thank you so much. We let you go as of now and have a very
13:10 blessed and a nice evening but only with the promise to sit down with you once again once
13:15 the general budget are due after the elections and maybe before that as well to discuss several
13:21 policy leads that you and your team so deftly put out. Thank you so much Pankaj and good luck
13:27 to you for the rest of the show as well. Thank you, thank you, thank you Avni. Avni Kapoor,
13:32 their lead accountability initiative CPR India, she could be reached at the rate avni_kapoor.
13:38 Thank you so much.