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India’s BJP-led government presents its last full budget next month ahead of the 2024 elections.
We analyzed official data to see what progress has been made since the budget announced a year ago.
Promises of economic growth and spending
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in her Budget 2022 estimated India’s economic growth in the current financial year at “9.2%. This is the highest among all major economies,” he said.
But the RBI revised its growth forecast for the year to 6.8% last December, amid fears of a global slowdown after the war in Ukraine and rising fuel prices.
Even with that revised low growth estimate, the World Bank says India remains the “fastest growing economy” among the seven largest emerging and developing economies globally.
IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said this month that India was performing “well above the global average”.
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According to the Ministry of Statistics, India’s GDP growth stood at 13.5% in the first quarter of the fiscal year. However, it declined to 6.3% in the second quarter. Because the manufacturing sector is sluggish due to high cost of raw materials and fuel prices.
The government has pledged to keep its fiscal deficit target, the difference between total expenditure and revenue, at 6.4% of GDP, according to RBI figures.
The target for 2020 and 2021 is lower than 9.1% and 6.7% respectively. Covid-related demands on government funds eased.
However, the government’s target is to keep spending at 39.45 trillion rupees ($4,800bn; £3,800bn). But it will increase due to higher import costs, subsidies on food, fuel and fertilizers, RBI data shows.
Delay in welfare promises
Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (Housing for All) was launched in 2015. It is one of the flagship welfare schemes of the Narendra Modi government.
In the last budget, 480 million rupees ($59bn; £47bn) was allocated with a promise to build 8 million houses for deserving beneficiaries in rural and urban areas in the 2022-23 financial year.
In this quota, though there are rural and urban housing, they are implemented by different ministries.
The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs oversees the urban component of the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana.
The ministry had in August last year sought an extension of the deadline and further financial assistance from the central government, saying it had not yet achieved its target.
The deadline for this has been extended till December 2024.
In the current financial year, from April 1, 2022 to January 23, 2023, 12 lakh houses have been completed in urban areas. Meanwhile, according to data from the supervising ministries, 26 lakh houses have been completed in rural areas under this scheme in the financial year 2022-23. This means that 42 lakh houses have been completed less than the government’s target.
The finance minister allocated 600 billion rupees ($74bn; £60bn) “with the aim of providing piped water connections to 38 million households in the 2022-23 financial year”.
According to data from the Ministry of Water Resources, only about 17 million households have been provided piped water connections so far this year. This is 50% short of the set target.
Since the project was launched in August 2019, 77 million households have received piped water.
Speed of road construction slows down
The finance minister also announced last year that the national highways network would be “expanded by 25,000 km in the financial year 2022-23”.
These include construction of 25,000 km of new roads, development of existing roads, and declaration of state highways as national highways.
Of this, the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways has set a target of up to 12,000 km this fiscal.
The latest data released by the ministry shows that a total of 5,774 km of national highways have been constructed during the period from April to December 2022. But we don’t have data for January this year.
According to previous years’ data, the daily construction speed has slowed down to 29 km per day in 2021-22 and an average of 37 km per day in FY 2020-21 and 21 km per day this year.
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