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The present euphoria among the BJP-led government ministers after the presentation of the 2025-26 budget in Parliament over the mega relief to the income tax payers of the country might be shared by the estimated one crore people in the country benefited due to the budget proposals. But in terms of its impact on the consumption behaviour among the people, it will be limited and not as big as the policy makers, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, are projecting them to be.

In 2025-26 budget some strategic steps have been taken to stimulate India’s business environment including reforms to remove bottlenecks in key business areas, reducing minimum capital requirement, and simplifying the process of obtaining necessary licenses. But the focus of this eight budget presented by the finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman was on boosting consumption by giving big relief to the income tax payers totalling Rs. one lakh crore.

Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman talked big during her budget speech emphasizing “Agriculture as the first Engine” for India’s development journey announcing a slew of measures to spur agriculture growth and productivity benefitting the Annadata. However, farmers are not appeased. In contrast, they will be burning the copies of Union Budget 2025-56 on February 5 in protest, alleging it to be anti-farmers, anti-worker, and pro-corporate.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: It is the same old story, infuriatingly repetitive year after year and Budget after Budget. Kerala continues to be at the receiving end of the Union Government’s callous neglect in the Budget.

February 5, when Delhi votes to elect a new assembly, a factor that will have a say, but has been pushed to the back-burner, will be ‘Batenge toh katenge’, just like it had counted in the Haryana and Maharashtra assembly elections. This, even after Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his clique of BJP leaders and media proxies, which includes almost every BJP underling of the Prime Minister, went out of their way to play down Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's winning streak in Haryana, Jammu & Kashmir and Maharashtra with ‘Batenge toh katenge.’

On February 1, 2025, Zakia Jafri passed away at the age of 86, quietly resting in her sister’s home in Ahmedabad - a city that changed her life forever, but where she kept coming back. She was Zakiaappa to me, and I was her lawyer right from the Magistrate’s Court to the Supreme Court.

It would be wrong to underplay the impact of rising foreign disinvestments from the country’s secondary market on the economy and the very stability of Indian Rupee (INR). Both the domestic economy and INR have been constantly under pressure from large deficit trade balances year after year, external borrowings, loan servicing, very low levels of fresh foreign direct investment (FDI) and high real-time inflation rate. Some foreign portfolio investors (FPIs) seem to find the country’s secondary market no longer attractive. According to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), it sold $50 billion from the central bank’s foreign exchange reserves during this fiscal as FPIs sold large rupee stocks to pull back investment. The sum is quite big by any standard. Never before had FPIs exited from the Indian market in such a fashion just before the country’s annual budget presentation. It would have been nice if the RBI clearly mentioned the periods involved in such transactions and the net currency outflow from its forex reserves on account of FPI investments and disinvestments.

At a time when India’s labour market is undergoing an unprecedented crisis, with about 19 per cent of them are in unpaid employment but counted as employed by the government, non-availability of jobs in the job market has been pushing the people towards self-employment which has risen to 58.4 per cent in 2024-25 according to Economic Survey 2024-25, and 46.1 per cent of India’s workforce were engaged in very low paying agriculture works in 2024 as per PLFS, the Union Budget 2025-26 is utterly frustrating for India’s workforce.

India has allocated Rs 6.81 lakh crore (approximately US$82.6 billion) for defence in the financial year (FY) 2025-26, marking a 9.53 per cent increase from the previous year’s Budget of Rs 6.22 lakh crore. This increase highlights the country’s focus on modernizing the military and strengthening national security.

Saffron ecosystem is desperate to project Narendra Modi’s 2025-26 budget as a significant effort to conjure the middle class to make a strong comeback in the politics of the country and give an exuberant push to the economy. Regrettably this is not even the half-truth. An insight into the ecstasy would expose its true nature and real intent of the government.