From 50 Years Ago: Old Wine

Old Wine

The first session of the fifth Lok Sabha is intended to be a perfunctory affair except for the Presidential address on Tuesday and the Finance Minister’s budget speech the next day, both of which must be reckoned as the first major policy statements on behalf of the new government. Reading them the first thought that occurs is a rather irreverent one. So laced are both with expressions of the government’s concern for the poor and the unemployed and its resolve to ‘abolish’ poverty, banish unemployment, reduce disparities and so on that one would think that this was the first time that the government was waking up to the facts of poverty, unemployment and economic inequality! A good deal of the ground covered by the two statements is common though, expectedly, the Presidential address takes a broader sweep which extends even to the government’s anxiety that rapid economic development should not “upset the ecological balance in nature”. However, since the focus of immediate interest is on the government’s intentions in the economic field, the budget speech should bear closer scrutiny.