ICRA’s Post

Transcript

Things We have an exclusive conversation where it was Aditi Nair. Chief Economist and head of Research at IQRA in conversation with the public business predicting a delicate balance between capitalizing on a revenue surplus and steering fiscal consolidation while addressing pressing needs like rural welfare and sustainable growth. Take a look. Hello, you're watching special broadcast by Republic Business. This is Rajat Mishra. Well, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitaraman is going to present the Union Budget 2024 in the second-half of July. Everyone is watching out for what are the what are the key things that are going to she is going to announce and what is in store from her side for the common people, corporate India and the various stakeholders of the economy. To get more clarity about what we can expect in the Union Budget, we are joined in by a very special guest. Chief Economist and Head of Research Aditi Nayar with the rating agency AKRA, welcome Aditi for joining us and speaking to a Republic business. Thank you, Madam. So Aditi, without wasting much time, let me just ask you first important question first. Everyone is talking about that this budget is going to prioritize certain things and that will outline the road for visit Bharat. What are your top expectation as far as this Union Budget is concerned? You know that this is a very interesting Union Budget. We've already had the interim budget which kind of gave us sneak peek into what we could expect from the full budget which will most likely be presented in July. And of course, the first budget off of each stone for this government, this limited time between the election results and the full budget. So what we would really expect is that the full prioritization and the full kind of agenda may be presented in the next budget or over the course of the next few months. In this budget, our expectation is, you know, on 2/3 counts. I'll just outline what we're expecting. First of all, there seems to be a little bit of a revenue upside in terms of both tax and all tax revenues as compared to what had been penciled in at the time of the interim budget which was presented in February. How will that revenue upside get spent? That's what we're looking forward to see, the split moves between revenue and capital expenditure and whether a portion of this revenue upside can actually be channelized towards faster fiscal consolidation in F I-25 as compared to what? This invasion last year. Now obviously there are always competing priorities on expenditure. Capital expenditure had already been given a fairly good step up in the entire budget. And given the fact that you know after the budget we still be in monsoon more for the next couple of months possibly increasing the CapEx budget further beyond what was Vincent into the term budget may not necessarily be very easy to spend in a curtailed number of months that people have left with us. So for what will likely to see some increase in the revenue expenditure was you know part of the budget perhaps.