Central Hall | ‘A Budget Full of Trickery’: Kapil Sibal Asks Economists How to Make Sense of It

Ten years since Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power, the economy has undergone no significant improvement. After 2016, the decision to implement demonetisation destroyed the MSME sector. In 2019, the government tried to give benefits to the corporate sector by reducing tax rates. The corporate sector did not deliver and it used it as an opportunity to clean up their balance sheets. The agriculture sector is stuttering.

The Narendra Modi government has now got a fillip in the form of Rs 2.1 lakh crores of dividends from the Reserve Bank of India. Former Union minister and advocate Kapil Sibal is joined by three experts – economists Jayati Ghosh, Arun Kumar and Himanshu – who try to answer what’s good and bad about the budget. One of these is more difficult to answer than the other.