Samir Arora, Fund Manager , Helios Capital

Clearly, the markets were expecting a few things and beyond that the Finance Minister has not packaged his presentation well. He has made it to look more like 1980s budget where you start straight away by saying how you are giving Rs 100 crore to this person and Rs 200 crore to that person. There was no big picture vision.

But overall if you look at the last one-month's announcements of the government, I think the packaging of that in one comprehensive note would have been a much better way of doing it.

In the short-term there might be disappointment but I broadly think that if you look at the last one-month's announcements and combine them all together and say what Kapil Sibal has said about education and Kamal Nath has said about roads or the joining of Nandan Nilekani as a governance improvement and you have packaged all together or the fact that last week we had an oil price hike and had presented it together as one policy. The market which is always looking for a analysis to be done by the Minister himself and doesn't want today to react to what happened last week is disappointing.

But I think after 4-5 days, they will forget about it just like a few months ago when Geithner became Treasury Secretary, he came and said I'll give you a package in a few weeks, and the markets were 'Oh really! Two weeks' then they hit the market down 20% without bothering to wait for it.

So, it is that handling of the market which was bad. Otherwise I don't think it was in anyway negative.

I don't think the budget had much to disappoint but I think the big picture is that we cannot first anticipate so many things from the budget and when they don't happen say they should not have been in the budget in the first place and that's not right place. I think may be the government to stop everybody wasting time should decide and announce that we will not discuss, which I also guessed that we will not discuss education in the budget.

That we will not discuss some other things in the budget but somethings are expected. The problem with the budget this time is that Mr. Mukherjee has come out as a reluctant reformer and scared of ghost which does not exists.

For example, what was the harm in saying if it is going to happen a few days or a month that we want in insurance foreign direct investment to come in? We must realise that the market is a big positive to this country and it is something to be respected.

The billions of dollars that foreign investors have put into real estate companies is not speculation. It is basically helping the non performing loans that otherwise all these banks and housing companies would have had.

So, in some sense the Finance Minister has to be sensitive to these things and that is all there is. Otherwise, as I said if you combine what has happened in the last month and put it all together as one announcement of this new government, it has been a remarkable change and it is much bigger than anything would have been expected. We for example underplay the impact of what Nandan Nilekani joining the government is.

It is not something to do with implementation or for identification programme. It is basically signaling to the world that the government wants to spend, according to me, about USD 5 billion on this project and chooses for it to be handled in a non-corrupt manner.

Obviously, there is not going to be only one person joining the government like that. May be in a few months we will see other people may be Mr. Parekh I don't know some other high profile guys at the market and the Indian system respects and loves. So, all these people or some or more will join and therefore to view all these things as a small and irrelevant because they do not get packaged today in an announcement. As I said, if instead of announcing it that day today the Finance Minister or the Prime Minister had said to improve governance we are starting these policy or philosophy that we will have good respected leaders from corporate joining, it would have been viewed as a great budget announcement.

Some of them may be because of sum-of-part calculation for insurance sector sell-offs and also definitely because of interest rates going up a little bit, in general the budget has been disappointing, so there is no point in analyzing it.

But I think it is temporary in the sense that markets have tended to over react on headline kind of numbers or headline kind of announcements, for example I heard you saying that foreign investors thought that 6.8% was too much but 6.3% was all right.

I don’t know how they get that number. So it is a trend and it is a direction which I think could have been a bit more forceful and a bit more articulate rather than going on to micro things straightaway. I think it is a big picture which is saying negative.

Clearly, nobody expected the government to sell down public sector banks to below 51% government ownership. So it cannot disappoint you if he said that we will stay at 51% or higher.

So I think it is just the fact that you haven’t given any vision and it has become more like a piecemeal kind of a budget today and therefore we have to see what happens in the next few weeks if there are some other announcements, may be it is viewed has been politically right to not talk about divestment or talk about insurance and that in itself is disappointing that who are we scared of now?