HomeNewsBusinessEconomyMoneycontrol Manifesto: Time for Finance Minister to go for broke in Budget 2021
Trending Topics

Moneycontrol Manifesto: Time for Finance Minister to go for broke in Budget 2021

Budget 2021: Sitharaman faces a fiscal war that will require her to deploy all the policy arsenal — unorthodox and conventional — to win this fight.

January 06, 2021 / 07:36 IST
Story continues below Advertisement

There has been rarely an occasion in independent India’s economic history when the union finance minister would have faced similar conditions in the run-up to the Union Budget.

Last year, when Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented her second budget, she was broadly confronted with the constraint of turning around a wobbly economy amid tepid household spending and shaky global conditions.

Story continues below Advertisement

A year later, she may well be looking back at these constraints with a degree of longing. COVID-19 and its spread have left a devastating trail of destruction across the economic landscape, blowing into smithereens the very framework of orthodox fiscal policy planning.

The lockdowns and the prolonged restrictions have forced many a company to shut or curtail operations, lowering the government's tax collections.