India's budget could have been more ambitions on the fiscal front, especially given a high public debt burden, and the less aspiring fiscal consolidation strategy is negative for ratings, an analyst at Fitch Ratings said on Monday.
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Saturday announced a budget that put boosting growth before painful reforms, slowing the pace of fiscal deficit cuts and seeking to put domestic and foreign capital to work.
"The medium-term fiscal consolidation strategy is less aspiring than in the past, which is negative from a sovereign rating perspective," Thomas Rookmaaker, director at Fitch's Asia-Pacific Sovereign Group wrote in an email. Budget 2015: Complete Coverage
"If disinvestment would be treated as a "below the line" financing item, as is international best practice, instead of a revenue item, the fiscal deficit would actually rise from 4.3 percent in FY15 to 4.4 per cent in FY16," he added.
