India’s Budget: competent but uninspiring

Commenting afterwards Prime Minister Modi said the Budget marked an end to the previous "disorder" in railway planning which had been done in "bits and pieces".

India's State-owned railways are the fourth largest in the world, but have suffered from years of low investment and populist policies that have kept fares low. Patronage is enormous, with travellers who could not get a place inside carriages often hanging from the sides or sitting on the roofs, but the system has been loss making for decades.

As a result the once mighty railway network- the pride of the British Raj - has become a slow, badly congested system that is a brake on economic growth.

All of which left commentators wondering whether Jaitley could have been a little more visionary in his own statement. N.K Singh, a former BJP member of the Rajya Sabha (Upper House) asked whether the Finance Minister, whose team worked feverishly to present the Budget on time, simply got bogged down in the details.

"Is the budget riddled with too many details which obfuscate the big picture? Could more timelines have been given for the multiple initiatives mentioned in the Budget and the fiscal strategy more comprehensively crafted? Has enough been done on retrospective taxation? Has there been a failure in managing the expectations and aligning them with contemporary realities?" Singh asked.

Columnist Sanjoy Narayan, writing in theHindustan Times, said the Budget had left him unsatisfied. He thought that since the voters had given the BJP such a strong mandate, the Finance Minister could have done a bit of grandstanding, highlighting a couple of attention-grabbing measures and reaping the benefits of "making it a memorable Budget that would spread good cheer and sentiment throughout the nation".

"The markets would have gone cock-a-hoop; foreign investors may have started a queue; and, best of all, the new Finance Minister would have been a rock star," Narayan wrote.

However, as Australians know very well, rock stars do not always make the best Ministers. What Jaitley has done is craft a responsible Budget, tailored to India's current unenviable financial position, just 45 days after assuming the office.

The headlines are probably best left to Modi who as this is written, is attending the Brazil- Russia-India-China-South-Africa Summit of emerging regional powerhouses in Brazil.