The-New Gen Budget

Will The Modi Government's Initiatives For Massive Job Creation Work?

- RAJ CHENGAPPA with M.G. ARUN & KAUSHIK DEKA

UNION FINANCE MINISTER NIRMALA SITHARAMAN HAS ACQUIRED THE ART OF COINING SMART ACRONYMS for initiatives and schemes from her boss, Prime Minister Narendra Modi. When she presented the first Union budget of Modi 3.0 (her seventh as finance minister), she preferred to be politically correct by mentioning productivity in agriculture as the first on the list of the nation's nine priorities. But on her official X handle, to highlight the main theme of the budget, she rearranged the order of the nine focus areas so that the first letters of the words could spell EMPLOYMENT as in Employment, MSMEs, Productivity in agriculture, Land, Opportunities, Youth, Middle class, Energy, Next-gen reforms and Technology. Appropriately, a photograph of Modi was pasted next to the listing with the tag #BudgetViksit Bharat. Many interpreted the post as a tacit acknowledgement by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that the jobs crisis was one of the major reasons why they had failed to secure a full majority on their own in the Lok Sabha election held over April and May. And that there was an urgent need to deal with the problem to stem the loss of political capital.