India doesn’t need a bold Budget now, populist spending should be avoided

All prime ministers before him have respected the tradition of treating the last budget before elections as just a way to keep the government going for a few months. Modi should too

BS| On Feb. 1 in India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government will present its last federal budget before general elections are held in a few months. Unlike most other budgets, this typically isn’t a high-octane affair; governments are discouraged from locking their successors into any new spending or taxes. An “interim” budget, as it’s called, tries to avoid committing spending for the entire financial year, which begins from April.

But, Modi’s finance minister seems ready to break with that requirement. Politicians from India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party insist that there’s no legal requirement to present just a vote-on-account. And the reason’s obvious: They want to pack in as many big-ticket, populist announcements as they can before the election campaign formally begins and governments are forbidden to make new promises outside party manifestos.

Interim Budget 2019 While Modi doesn’t exactly have his back against the wall in his re-election campaign, he won’t be feeling entirely comfortable either. A round of state elections towards the end of last year saw the BJP lose control of three crucial North Indian states — in the very region that propelled him to his landslide victory in the last parliamentary elections in 2014.

The truth is that Modi doesn’t have very many seats to lose. His majority in the lower house of Parliament is both unprecedented by Indian standards and, nevertheless, razor thin. He won 282 seats out of 543 in 2014, and has lost several in by-elections since. A dip in the prime minister’s popularity doesn’t need to be significant for him to lose his majority. And if he has to try and craft a coalition, he may wind up being vulnerable to leadership challenges from within his party…

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What 2019 Budget can do to help India clean its air, reduce coal addiction

Addressing policy issues are important if India is to fulfill its commitment to the Paris Climate Agreement 2015 to install 175 giga watt (GW)

Interim Budget 2019: India has one of the world’s largest programmes to expand renewables–a doubling of capacity over the next four years–but India’s ambitious 2022 target of generating enough non-coal energy to replace the equivalent of 175 coal-powered plants is veering off track

On February 1, 2019, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has a chance to get things back on track, help India reduce its addiction to coal, help clean the country’s air and meet the global climate-change commitments of the world’s fourth-fastest growing carbon polluter

After record growth in the installed capacity of renewables over the four years to 2017, capacity addition slowed down in 2018. The main reasons: an anti-dumping duty imposed by the government on imported solar modules to aid domestic manufacturing, higher rates of taxation under the goods and service tax (GST) and unclear policy. So, the last budget before 2019 general elections is of particular significance to the renewables sector, which comprises electricity from solar, wind, hydro and bio power.

These are the issues the budget must contend with:

• Due to a 2018 slowdown, the government will have to install 3.5 times more capacity every month than its average speed for the last four years.
• A new duty on imported solar modules–which meet more than 80% of the country’s need–increased production costs and threaten the competitiveness of solar tariffs against those of coal.
• Higher GST rates on solar modules and services are driving away investors and manufacturers. Delays in a long-term policy to remove uncertainty from the sector is holding back new investment.

Why the renewables budget is important

Addressing policy issues are important if India is to fulfill its commitment to the Paris Climate Agreement 2015 to install 175 giga watt (GW)–a GW is 1000 mega watt (MW)–of renewables power capacity by 2022. This is enough to replace 175 coal-fired power plants of 1,000 MW each and reduce India’s dependence on fossil fuels.

Contain Source by Business Standard or BS