Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday flagged off the Gandhinagar-Mumbai Vande Bharat Express semi-high speed train.
Speaking during the Question Hour, the road transport and highways minister said the country has set several world records in road construction despite COVID-19. The construction of Zoji La tunnel on the Srinagar-Leh highway will be completed before 2024, while another Z-Morh tunnel will be completed in the next three months, he added.
As the FM said, this is a Budget that lays the foundation for the next 25 years, observes Kumar Mangalam Birla.
If 2019-20 (FY20) was an unusual year for highway construction in India, with the pace of work slowing down for the first time since the Narendra Modi government assumed power in 2014, largely due to the general elections in May and liquidity crunch, the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020-21 (FY21) only made matters worse with lockdowns and labour unavailability. The pace of highway construction in 2021-22 (FY22) has not been able to bulldoze the pandemic barriers in a year marred by two Covid-19 waves - the second at the start of the fiscal year, the third towards the close. With localised lockdowns and restrictions on mobility, highway construction growth in the country has now fallen to a five-year low.
'India's manufacturing will take 10-15 years to catch up with China.'
Generally, before adjourning the house sine die the chair reads out the statistics about the business transacted in the house in detail.
The government's programmes should be expected to generate some momentum, but the macro-economic numbers are not encouraging, observes T N Ninan.
While no specific state-oriented sops were rolled out, a strong thread of political wellness ran through the Budget.
Here's the full text of the maiden address to the nation by President Droupadi Murmu on the eve of Independence Day 2022.
'Wherever in the world there is political instability, those countries are beset with severe crises today. But India is in a much better position than the rest of the world due to the decisions taken by my government in the national interest,' President Droupadi Murmu said in her address to both Houses of Parliament.
Replying to the debate in Lok Sabha on Motion of Thanks to President Ram Nath Kovind's address to the Parliament, Modi said the Congress' 'arrogance' has not gone away despite multiple electoral defeats and its 'misdeeds' seem to indicate that it has made up its mind not to come to power for the next 100 years.
As if wanting to be an antidote to the coronavirus pandemic, the Indian stock market adorned carnival robes in 2021 with a tsunami of liquidity unleashed by global central banks coupled with supportive domestic policies and the world's largest vaccination drive sparking off a world-beating rally on Dalal Street, despite bouts of uneasiness over fizzy valuations. While the wider economy shuttled between recovery and relapse, dictated by multiple mutations of the virus, equity market benchmarks appeared headed in just one direction -- skywards. The dizzying upward journey has added a whopping Rs 72 lakh crore during 2021 to investors' wealth, measured as the cumulative value of all listed shares in the country, taking it to nearly Rs 260 lakh crore.
'There is a vision in the Budget, and the vision is to take India from a largely agrarian, rural economy into a fast-track digitalised economy.'
This was the one Budget that required radical departures on all these fronts, when it had none, asserts, Shreekant Sambrani.
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