Surplus in March, the last month of a financial year, has helped the government reduce fiscal deficit in the last few years.
Budget planners for now have been told to prepare with the assumption that GST will apply from April 1.
Budget-makers in North Block are looking to maintain this fiscal status quo, in spite of tax revenues nowhere close to where the government wants and in spite of possible higher expenditure commitments.
In the last fiscal, the government had originally budgeted a dividend income of Rs 27,178 crore (Rs 271.78 billion) from PSUs.
Retail inflation rose 4.38 per cent year-on-year in November, the slowest pace in data going back to January 2012.
The government must expedite its plan for asset sale and privatisation, both of which hardly got any mention in the Budget speech, points out A K Bhattacharya.
By any economic theory or doctrine, this is no Budget that supports economic recovery, whether through supporting aggregate demand, or through expansionary stimulus, declares Rathin Roy.
The coming elections seem a tough battleground for the BJP in the wake of anti-incumbency, Patidar and Dalit agitations and implementation of the GST.
'We are moving away from the Modi promise of less government,' says T N Ninan.
As India emerges from the COVID-19 crisis, the ninth budget under the Modi government, including an interim one, is widely expected to focus on boosting spending on job creation and rural development, generous allocations for development schemes, putting more money in the hands of the average taxpayer and easing rules to attract foreign investments.
Making sense of the international crude market is incredibly hard.
Enhanced revenue generation is a priority for the government.
Arun Jaitley said he would put the DTC Bill in cold storage.
'I would want people to have food on their tables and their wages to rise.' 'Will that happen or not is the question that we need to ask and answer.'
'If anything, he is a fiscal hawk.' 'He has avoided fiscal profligacy completely for the past four years.' 'The fiscal deficits since 2014 are clear proof of this.' 'The point is not that it is not 3 per cent yet; it is that it is not 6, 7 or 8 per cent, which it could easily have been.' 'For this he needs to be congratulated.' 'He has recognised it no longer pays to spend other people's money to win elections,' points out T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan.
Salary hike is fine but govt must reduce support staff to get its math right.
When emerging from this crisis, the govt must consider a fresh approach to reviving growth, revisiting the Centre-state fiscal balance, and devising a re-imagined GST 2.0, suggests T N Ninan.
Fiscal situation better but spending cuts likely in FY16 too.
If receipts from disinvestment, tax buoyancy and black money scheme offset shortfall in spectrum sale, higher expenditure due to pay commission's recommendations and capital expenditure, then the government would be able to meet the target of controlling fiscal deficit at 3.5 per cent of GDP this financial year.
The government last fiscal missed its direct tax collection target, and for this financial year it has set a higher revenue mobilisation goal of Rs 13.80 lakh crore.
The panel will also recommend a fiscal consolidation road map for the central and state governments, study the impact of GST on the divisible pool, and propose performance-based incentives for states.
Poor performance of the banking, oil and exploration industries have impacted corporate tax collections.
The obvious temptation for Mr Jaitley would be to achieve a better fiscal deficit figure than what he had promised in July.
Economists have said if a stimulus is needed it should be different from what was provided in 2008-09, when the economy faced the ripple effects of a global meltdown following the Lehman Brothers collapse.
Without the handsome receipts from the sale of government equity in PSUs and sharp increases in excise revenues from oil, Mr Jaitley's fiscal consolidation drive would have become even more arduous, says A K Bhattacharya.
To make possible discretionary spending including capex and that on welfare, the government decided to borrow more than planned in FY21 -- Rs 12.7 trillion.
Former prime minister Manmohan Singh said India is poised to take advantage of globalisation and engage in trade to finance its imports through exports.
'Milking poorly performing or easily marketable assets is the way to deliver more money for key programmes,' says T N Ninan.
Several critics including some rating agencies have doubted prospects of meeting this ambitious fiscal deficit target.
In a circular, the home ministry said the revised cash management system, formulated by the ministry of finance, has to be followed in view of the changes in tax receipt under the GST regime.
Last week, the government had introduced a fresh round of austerity measures, including bans on first class travel, creation of new posts and holding meetings in five-star facilities.
There are tell-tale signs of a slide in the quality of Budgets presented by the current administration, says Parthasarathi Shome.
Arun Jaitley had a tough fiscal hill to climb.
It is a record that the saffron party has created, where the majority of its legislators belonged to the minority community.
'Rather than cutting and pasting from advanced economies, we should use basic economic principles to think about what is right for India at the stage of development at which we are,' says Chief Economic Advisor Krishnamurthy Subramanian.
This Budget plans for an increase to 10.3% of GDP from 9.9%.
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has said that the states were free to announce farm loan waivers if they had the fiscal space and that there would be no shortfall this year in divestment and non-tax revenues.
With Jaitley preferring continuity over change, good days might take a little longer to arrive, says Shankar Acharya.
To check fiscal deficit, government needs to drastically cut Plan expenditure.
If this Budget was not packaged and sold as a Budget for the poor and for farmers, Narendra Modi would have lost the next election.
