The Wire Staff 
New Delhi: The budget’s lack of increase in funding to the rural employment guarantee scheme, its proposals for a poll-bound Bihar and an absence of the census in the finance minister’s speech are among the things that opposition politicians criticised the government for on Saturday (February 1).
“One proverb perfectly suits this budget – after eating nine hundred rats, the cat went to Hajj!” said Congress president and Rajya Sabha leader of opposition Mallikarjun Kharge.
Referring to finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s proposal that people earning up to Rs 12 lakh a year will effectively not need to pay income tax under the new regime, Kharge said that a person’s savings under this initiative would amount to “only Rs 6,666 per month”.
“In the last ten years, the Modi government has collected Rs 54.18 lakh crores of income tax from the middle class, and now the exemption of up to 12 lakhs is being given, according to which the finance minister herself is saying that there will be a saving of Rs 80,000 per year. That is, only Rs 6,666 per month!” Kharge said on X.
Stagnant MGNREGS allocation ‘cruel blow against rural poor’: CPI(M)
He also pointed out that the budget under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) for this year – the government has estimated its expenditure at Rs 86,000 crore – remains unchanged from last year’s figures.
Rs 86,000 crore is what the government – which says the MGNREG scheme is ‘demand-driven’ – pegged as its revised budgetary expenditure for the MGNREGA for 2024-25. It had also allocated the same amount for the scheme in the 2024-25 budget.
The Communist Party of India (Marxist), which called the budget “by the rich [and] for the rich” in a statement, said that the stagnant allocation to the MGNREGS was “not only a cruel blow against the rural poor” but also “an outright assault on the legal right for 100 days work”.
Former Congress president and now Lok Sabha leader of opposition Rahul Gandhi said the budget was akin to a “band-aid for bullet wounds”.
“Amid global uncertainty, solving our economic crisis demanded a paradigm shift. But this government is bankrupt of ideas,” Gandhi said in a short X post.
Leaders take aim at budget’s proposals for Bihar
Tamil Nadu chief minister M.K. Stalin faulted the budget for allegedly not mentioning his state frequently despite the “prominent place” it holds in “all the reports of the Union government, such as the Economic Survey, the Ranking of Higher Education Institutions and the NITI Aayog report”.
Asking what was stopping New Delhi from funding highways and projects such as metro systems for Coimbatore and Madurai, he charged that “plans and funds are announced only for the state in which elections are to be held and where the BJP coalition is in power”.
That was an oblique reference to Bihar, towards which Sitharaman in her budget speech proposed a Makhana board, a food processing institute, a greenfield airport near Patna and financial support to a canal project for a flood-prone region in the state.
It also happens that assembly elections are due in the state later this year, where the BJP and its National Democratic Alliance (NDA) partner, the Janata Dal (United) (JD(U)), are currently in power.
“Obviously this is meant with the Bihar elections in mind. It’s ironic that the party that wants ‘one nation, one election’ seems to think that each time there’s an election in a state, you’re going to give them freebies. By this rate you may as well have multiple elections so everyone can benefit,” Congress MP Shashi Tharoor told PTI.
K.T. Rama Rao, a scion of the Telangana-based Bharat Rashtra Samithi that is neither part of the opposition INDIA bloc nor the NDA, also said the budget “appears to have focused more on the upcoming Delhi and Bihar elections” and that his state “yet again … received diddly squat”.
Nothing wrong with Bihari youth benefitting from proposals: JD(U) Union minister
Responding to the criticism against the budget’s proposals for Bihar, JD(U) MP and Union minister Rajiv Ranjan “Lalan” Singh said there was nothing wrong with schemes that benefitted Bihar’s people.
“It is the opposition’s job … Bihar is also a part of this country and if it has got something, then what is wrong with that?” Singh was quoted as saying by PTI.
He added, referring to the proposals mentioned above, that they will “be greatly beneficial for the youth of Bihar. What is the problem with that?”
Disappointing that Sitharaman did not mention census: Jairam Ramesh
Congress Rajya Sabha MP Jairam Ramesh said he found it “highly disappointing” that Sitharaman’s budget speech “made no mention of releasing funds for the decadal population census that was supposed to have taken place in 2021, but has still not been conducted”.
“The consequences on the state’s administrative capabilities are serious,” Ramesh continued, adding to claim that 10 to 12 crore people were excluded from the National Food Security Act because of the delay in conducting the census.
PTI reported that the government’s allocation of Rs 574.8 crore to the Census, Surveys and Statistics/Registrar General of India in the 2025-26 budget suggested that the exercise could possibly witness a further delay.
Samajwadi Party chief and MP Akhilesh Yadav said the budget was “merely a web of numbers to mislead the common man” and said the infrastructure in cities such as Varanasi, Prayagraj and Ayodhya were ‘crumbling’, as per The Hindu.
Yadav had also brought up the crowd crush at the Kumbh mela on Wednesday before the budget was presented in parliament today.