Readers of the Diary must be familiar with the Indian parable of the blind men and the elephant, how each one described the elephant differently by just touching its different parts and eventually started quarrelling, as we Indians often do if others don’t agree with our viewpoint.
India’s annual budget is something like an elephant. It’s humongous. The budget papers running into several thousand pages are transported from the finance ministry’s underground printing facility to the parliament building in a truck. I doubt if anyone has ever read the entire budget in toto all these years. It is compartmentalised into several sections based on inputs from the various ministries, industries and other sources and each section will have different heads and sub-sections. 
While the finance minister and his secretariat will have an overall picture of what is in those papers, the gist of all the main points are distilled into a few score pages which are then stuffed into a gleaming leather attache case for the minister to carry into the Lok Sabha on B-day.
Naturally, in a speech lasting 100-odd minutes the minister cannot be expected to elaborate on all that he and his team has planned for the nation. Very often you will hear the minister saying “the details of this are given in the annexure” or something to that effect, meaning those who want to study a point threadbare will have to delve into the annexures.
So, if the budget is an elephant, those who sit down to analyse it immediately after its presentation are somewhat like the blind men, at least the majority of them. Of course the politicians are different. Those in the opposition will only describe it disparagingly while those from the ruling side will only have affirmative superlatives for the budget. You will be none the wiser listening to them. Hence, what a Palaniyappan Chidambaram or a Piyush Goyal says must be taken with that proverbial pinch of salt.
But even non-partisan journalists and economists are bound to have differing views because they analyse it from different angles. So, if respected economist-journalist Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar described Finance Minister Arun Jaitley’s latest budget as “non-populist”, The Hindu newspaper called it a “mix of populism and prudence”, columnist Neerja Chowdhary felt it was “rather colourless but politically focused” and veteran commentator and educationist Pratap Bhanu Gupta was of the view Jaitley was trying to bluff his “way out on the three tensions – rural vs urban, public vs private and global vs Indian.”
But almost every expert is unanimous in the view that the three main thrusts of the budget – farmers’ welfare, healthcare and infrastructure – have been long overdue and Jaitley had finally addressed these issues in an emphatic manner. Perhaps the one proposal that stands head and shoulders above all others is the promise of health insurance cover of Rs500,000 each for 100mn poor families. 
This announcement is of a piece with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s other major initiatives like the ‘Swachch Bharat’ (Clean India) mission, the movement to free India from open defecation that has been scourge of the countryside for decades and the free distribution of cooking gas to nearly 30mn households where poor women had been exposed to poisonous fumes from kerosene-fired stoves or even worse. 
Much has achieved in all these spheres, especially in the matter of awareness which is the most difficult part when you are dealing with a largely uneducated population. This is a work in progress in every sense.
So, if Chidambaram feels the health insurance scheme – dubbed ‘Modicare’ on the lines of ‘Obamacare’– is just another ‘jumla’ (false promise) because Jaitley did not elaborate on how he was going to fund the initiative, he may eventually have to swallow his words because the details of the programme are emerging slowly. Swallowing words is second nature to politicians anywhere, so Chidambaram won’t be worried.
The proposal, according to some government sources, is for a centre-state joint effort on a 60-40 basis. This is a clever move by Modi because no state government would want to be seen as objecting to a healthcare scheme for its people and that too by spending a fraction of the total expense.
According to finance ministry officials it may take six months or so for the programme to go on stream. But if 500mn people are going to be served, it is only natural that it takes time. As Jitendra Singh, junior minister in Modi’s cabinet, remarked, “This (announcement) is the first step in that journey of a thousand miles.”
Singh may have used a very oft-heard phrase about the thousand-mile journey but he was also indirectly iterating what most Indians have come to believe – that Modi is here for the long haul. Providing insurance coverage for 500mn people cannot be done in a day or a year or perhaps even in five years. But Modi is shrewd enough to realise that by the time the next Lok Sabha elections roll in some time in April-May 2019, enough impact would have been made, especially among the rural folk, for him to retain power. 
There has been some speculation that the polls will be advanced to coincide with the assembly elections in Rajasthan later this year, but it is quite doubtful whether Modi would be in any hurry to do so, especially when his biggest pro-poor programme has just come out of the anvil. He will also be aware of his party’s blunder in 2004 when the then prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee went in for elections with more than a year left in his tenure and suffered a shock defeat at the hands of Sonia Gandhi-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA). 
Agriculture and infrastructure are the other two areas where Jaitley is planning to spend large sums. Both have a rural ring about them. Farmers, especially the small and marginal ones, mostly live in villages. Jaitley has reiterated the government’s commitment to double farmer income by 2022. To this end he is proposing to increase the minimum support price (MSP) of all farm produce to 1.5 times the input cost. Niti Ayog, the government’s economic think-tank, is already working on the programme.
Much of the infrastructure proposals also are rural oriented. Some 57,000km of rural roads are scheduled to be built in the next one year. The budget also envisages construction of 5.1mn fixed roof houses with toilets in villages. These are still small numbers compared to the vastness of the country but a major jump from the UPA era’s best performance of 27,000km of roads and 1.4mn houses.
Infrastructure work has two main advantages. It provides jobs even as it brings development. According to Roads Minister Nitin Gadkare, a Rs100bn project could provide jobs to as many as 100,000 people. The budget allocates close to Rs6trn for roads, railways, airports and inland waterways. You can do the math.
If all these proposals are implemented as planned, and that is a big ‘IF’, Modi should have little problem returning winner next year. But the recent by-elections in Rajasthan have given an altogether different signal. But that’s a story for another day.