Skewed economics to assuage our guilty conscience Post budget 2023-2024, there is a cartoon doing the rounds on social media of someone (apparently the Finance Minister) telling a group of people “I have given you Income Tax relief. Now what more do you want?” And the people reply in unison “Income”. That about sums up our much acclaimed budget!
India is a large country with a population of 1.35 billion people. We need a supplementary budget exclusively for the lower half of the population mounting to over 650 million people. This lower half by itself would be the third largest country in the world by population. We need to give this lower half of population special status or else the condition of the poor will never improve.
The budget benefits the upper crust. With so much inequality of wealth we cannot take the entire population as one unit while calculating the average income of an Indian family and then preparing a budget based on this false assumption. We must first determine the average income of the lower half (650 million people) to give a clearer picture of the extent of poverty in the country. We can no longer use skewed economics to assuage our guilty conscience.
