Budget Reactions: Budget punctures market hopes, says Udayan

Udayan Mukherjee, managing editor,CNBC TV 18 says that the Union Budget is a non-event for the market and not worthy of the expectations that P Chidambaram might have stoked in his commentary in the past.

He  says that there are some irritants for the market. The surcharge has gone up. There is a super-rich tax, bank’s convention interest rate subvention will go up which is not very good. So all of these things are irritants. On the other side there are small palliatives like the Securities Transaction Tax (STT) going down on the other hand Commodities Transaction Tax (CTT) has come in. Barring a couple of small things like maybe a road regulator or the investment allowance which has come in for infrastructure and a very small attempt at getting the savings rate higher, not a significant attempt. There is no big bang announcement in this Budget which can re-stoke growth and that is what everybody was looking for. Yes he has put out that 4.8 percent target, but that comes with a 30 percent jump in plan expenditure for 2013, so the math has to add up, because plan expenditure has gone up significantly, yet he has given out 4.8 percent fiscal deficit target. On other issues on investments and growth he has not made the big announcements which the market was hoping for and that you can see in the disappointment. Markets are not down too much because it is a workman like Budget, but it has not got the big bang proposals it was looking for and therefore this Budget might be forgotten by the end of the day and from tomorrow onwards we might go back to tracking global cues and other important things. This one is not the big Budget which can breathe life into the economy or send growth skyrocketing. On a prima facie reading of it, it does not look like that big a Budget.