New Delhi, July 07: The white bandhgala-clad 73-year-old “leader for all seasons” and principal political trouble-shooter of the grand old Congress party, finance minister Mr Pranab Mukherjee, has gone down in history. For, the last time he presented a full-fledged Budget was in 1984 when he was a young, pipe-smoking FM (in pic) in the then Indira Gandhi Cabinet.
Mr Mukherjee, in fact, earned a unique distinction today as he became the first finance minister to present Budgets on either side of an election and the first to do so after a 25-year-gap.
No other finance minister in Independent India presented an interim budget before the elections and then followed that up with a regular Budget for the same year after the incumbent government was voted back to power. In February this year, Mr Mukherjee had already presented an interim Budget. Similarly, no other finance minister has presented two regular Budgets in a gap spanning a quarter-century.
Mr Mukherjee’s last three budgets were presented between 1982 and 1984. He was rated as one of the best five finance ministers in the world for 1984, according to a survey by an American journal, Euro Money. Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, who had served as RBI Governor when the former was the FM in the Indira government today witnessed history in the making.
But although it was an encore after 25 years, some of the economic circumstances were similar. While today Mr Mukherjee faced the challenge of rescuing the nation’s economy out of the impact of global recession, in the eighties he had to take India out of its own worst economic crisis with GDP slipping and inflation skyrocketing. He had then responded with bold measures such as allowing NRIs to invest in National Savings Schemes and reducing taxes.
He would also be remembered for India not withdrawing the last US $1.1 billion instalment of an IMF loan.
His third budget in 1984 in some sense anticipated quite a bit of reforms that were to sweep the Indian economy in less than a decade.
