PHOTO: REUTERS

PALLAB BHATTACHARYA

With fresh parliamentary elections a few months away, India’s Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman yesterday tabled an interim budget of Rs 47.66 lakh crore in parliament for fiscal year 2024-25 with focus on youth, women, the poor and farmers, four key constituents of the electorate and announced special funds for tech-savvy youth and addition of two crore rural houses in the next five years.

The size of the interim budget for FY25 was 6 percent higher than that of the previous year.

“The poor, youth, women and farmers are the highest priority for the government,” she said and announced an additional two crore houses will be constructed as part of the Prime Minister’s housing scheme in rural areas.

Despite the challenges due to Covid-19 pandemic, the implementation of the prime minister’s rural housing scheme continued and “we are close to achieving the target of three crore houses. Two crore more houses will be taken up in the next five years to meet the requirement arising from increase in the number of families,” Sitharaman said in her 58-minute budget speech.

More than 70 percent houses under the PM rural housing scheme are for women which has “increased their dignity”, she added.

The housing requirements of rural communities also propels the growth in the housing sector and by enhancing the accessibility of affordable housing, the initiative seeks to boost the confidence of the rural population, fostering a feeling of security and pride as they undertake the experience of dwelling in their own homes, Sitharaman said.

Turning to youth, she said “for our tech-savvy youth, this will be a golden era. A corpus of Rs one lakh crore will be established with 50-year interest-free loan provided. It will be for long-term financing or re-financing with low or nil interest rates”.

Referring to farmers, the interim budget for 2024-25 fiscal year promised to step up value addition in agricultural sector, boost farmers’ income and further promote private and public investment in post-harvest activities including aggregation, modern storage, efficient supply chains, primary and secondary processing and marketing and branding to ensure faster growth of the agriculture and food processing sector.

The interim budget is aimed at taking care of the fiscal needs of the intervening period until a new government is formed after the Lok Sabha polls expected sometime in April. The full budget will be presented in July after the election.

The finance ministry expects the gross domestic product to expand at 7 percent for FY24, slightly lower than earlier expectations. The finance minister said the fiscal deficit of the government would remain at 5.8 percent in financial year 2023-24 and was committed to containing it at 4.5 percent in FY26.

Sitharaman said the foreign direct investment inflow into India during 2014-23 was $596 billion, which is twice the same inflow during 2005-14.

“For encouraging sustained foreign investment, we are negotiating bilateral investment treaties with our foreign partners in the spirit of ‘first develop India’,” she added.