February 28 is the counting of votes for the elections in the three states of Meghalaya, Nagaland and Tripura. It is also the date set aside by Parliament for presenting the Union budget. Obviously there will be divided attention about the outcome of the results in the 3 states as people would be keeping their ears and eyes glued to the television sets to find out how this yearly major budget exercise affects them. The UPA-2 is now notorious for cutting down subsidies on LPG cylinders and for hiking the prices of petrol and diesel, both of which have resulted in spiralling prices of essential commodities in hill states depending on road transport.
On Tuesday the Rail Budget was hailed as a progressive and implementable one where services will be better and there is a choice for passengers to use better and modern coaches with good ambience to provide higher travel comfort to passengers. The travelling fare in such a coach will be priced separately, Railway Minister Pawan Kumar Bansal announced in his Budget speech. The reality is that if trains improve so will the passenger traffic. It remains to be seen how the Rail Budget benefits the North eastern states, especially those states which are not yet connected by railway lines.
As always there are huge expectations that the Union Budget will kick-start another opportunity for economic growth after the sluggish trends that almost sent India down to the status of a banana republic with the rupee sliding down dangerously. Now the market is a bit more bullish and foreign direct investment has started flowing in during the past few months after the harsh measures of subsidy withdrawals were announced and FDI in retail was adopted by Parliament.
Next year being election year it is expected that the UPA-2 will pull out all the stops to give the public a dream budget which will try to please all. P Chidambaram is known to be both a financial wizard and a tough task master as well. Some strict measure would be necessary to make up for the entire dole made through MNREGA and other populist schemes. This year the cash transfer to BPL families will start. This too will cut a hole in the Union Budget but it is expected that the UPA-2 will rob Peter to pay Paul. All this excitement will take away a lot of our own post election results exhilaration. But that’s how important the North Eastern States are in the larger schemes of things.