Budget 2013: P Chidambaram presented a 'responsible' budget, guided by economic and not political concerns

With the government facing a chainsaw of bad news on the economy, finance minister P Chidambaram has done exactly what he promised during his roadshows abroad — present a ‘responsible’ Budget.

The exercise, aimed at compressing expenditure drastically and reining in fiscal profligacy, signalled that the priority of the government is to put the economy back on rails and not opt for an early electoral combat. Although the FM’s speech on Thursday dealt at length with addressing the concerns and aspirations of women, youth and the poor, he refrained from attempting to achieve the objective through more freebies and government-sponsored schemes.

Chidambaram did make a Rs 10,000 crore allocation to Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s pet scheme, the food guarantee programme, as the party leadership and the civil society activists associated with the National Advisory Council consider it a potential vote catcher.

He also managed to create an impression that the focus was on rural development programmes. “We estimate that they will be able to spend Rs 55,000 crore before the end of the current year and I propose to allocate Rs 80,194 crore in 2013-14 marking an increase of 46 per cent,” he said.