Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman found a new ‘bakra’ to blame for the failure of economics. She blames millennials for the car sale slump, says they aren’t buying cars. They prefer Ola & Uber to new cars. What would she say about what the poor failed to do? And her eternal failures.
CRITICS have called the budget a “lacklustre no-masala budget”. My one-year cat might have done better because she manages her food with sound economic ideas. It faced strong criticism for failing to address immediate job creation, MSME distress, and rural economic concerns, while relying on numerous, potentially fleeting, schemes. Reports indicate that allocations for critical social welfare programmes—including those for education, health, and rural development—have seen reductions or stagnant growth, failing to address the needs of the underprivileged.
Critics argued that the budget fails to address pressing issues like high inflation, unemployment, and rural distress, offering little immediate relief for the daily struggles of low-income groups. An analysis suggests that allocations for Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) are significantly below mandatory targets, with funds being diverted to other sectors.
This is a budget for boardrooms, not breadlines. Nirmala Sitharaman may call it growth-oriented, but for millions of Indians struggling to survive, one brutal question remains: can the poor eat the budget document for breakfast?
Once again, India’s Union Budget has chosen optics over outcomes, markets over meals, and corporate confidence over human survival. Wrapped in the familiar language of “capital expenditure,” “fiscal prudence,” and “long-term growth,” the budget reassures investors and rating agencies while quietly abandoning those at the bottom of India’s deeply unequal economic pyramid. At a time when hunger, unemployment, and precarity define everyday life for a majority of Indians, the budget reads like a document written by and for those insulated from these realities.
Growth Without Hunger Relief Is Hollow
India today is one of the world’s fastest-growing major economies – but also one of the hungriest. That contradiction is not accidental; it is the outcome of deliberate policy choices.
Over 800 million Indians continue to rely on free food grains under the Public Distribution System. This is not a sign of success—it is an admission that the economic model has failed to ensure basic food security through income, employment, or fair wages. If growth were truly inclusive, such emergency dependence would have diminished, not become permanent.
Food inflation remains a crushing burden. For the poor, food accounts for 50–60 per cent of household expenditure. Even modest price increases devastate nutrition, force families to skip meals, and push children out of school and into labour. Yet allocations for nutrition programmes—ICDS, mid-day meals, and maternal health – either stagnate or rise only nominally, meaning real cuts after inflation. A budget that does not aggressively prioritise food security in a country with chronic malnutrition is not neutral – it is violent in its consequences.
Malnutrition: India’s National Emergency
India continues to perform abysmally on global hunger and nutrition indicators. Over one-third of Indian children are stunted, and wasting remains alarmingly high. Anaemia affects a majority of women and adolescent girls, undermining health, productivity, and intergenerational well-being.
These are not abstract statistics. They reflect children going to bed hungry, women working through exhaustion, and families trapped in cycles of deprivation. Yet the budget offers no serious nutrition mission, no emergency expansion of food and health entitlements, and no acknowledgement that malnutrition is not a side issue – it is a national crisis.
A government that can mobilise vast resources overnight for corporate tax cuts, infrastructure for private players, or bank recapitalisation claims helplessness when asked to feed its people.
Jobs: The Missing Chapter
If hunger is one side of the crisis, unemployment is the other. India’s labour market remains deeply distressed. Open unemployment is only part of the story; underemployment, informalisation, and stagnant real wages define the lived reality of work. The vast majority of Indian workers are informal, without contracts, social security, or income stability.
Real wages for informal workers have barely grown in years, and in some sectors have declined in real terms due to inflation. Yet the budget offers no comprehensive employment strategy—no urban employment guarantee, no serious expansion of MGNREGA, no labour-intensive public works on the scale required.
Instead, the government continues to fetishise capital-intensive infrastructure projects that generate headlines but relatively few jobs. Airports, expressways, and logistics parks do little for the millions of young Indians searching for dignified work.
Growth without jobs is not development; it is dispossession.
The Upper-Class Comfort Zone
While the poor are told to wait for trickle-down miracles, the budget remains generous to the upper classes.
Tax structures continue to favour those with higher incomes and capital gains. Wealth concentration accelerates while redistributive taxation remains politically taboo. India today is among the most unequal societies in the world, with a tiny elite controlling a staggering share of national wealth.
There is no wealth tax, no inheritance tax, no serious effort to tax super-profits, and no rollback of the massive corporate tax cuts introduced earlier. Fiscal discipline, it seems, applies only when welfare is discussed – not when elite interests are at stake. The message is unmistakable: austerity for the poor, incentives for the rich.
Welfare as Charity, Not Rights
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the budget is its ideological framing. Welfare is treated not as a constitutional obligation or economic necessity, but as charity—dispensed reluctantly, trimmed quietly, and framed as a burden on the exchequer.
This approach ignores a basic truth: public spending on health, nutrition, education, and employment is not waste – it is investment. A hungry, unhealthy, insecure population cannot sustain growth, democracy, or social stability.
Yet the budget offers no expansion of public healthcare commensurate with need, no serious strengthening of government schools, and no universal social security framework for workers. Instead, the state withdraws while urging citizens to rely on markets that have consistently failed them.
Paper Growth, Empty Plates
Budgets are political documents. They reveal not only priorities, but values. This budget values capital over labour, efficiency over equity, and perception over lived reality. It assumes that growth figures will silence hunger, that investor confidence will compensate for empty stomachs, and that patience is an acceptable substitute for justice.
But GDP numbers cannot be eaten. Fiscal targets cannot nourish children. And growth stories cannot mask the daily struggle of survival faced by millions. A nation that boasts of being an economic powerhouse while tolerating mass hunger, joblessness, and malnutrition is not rising – it is fracturing.
The Question That Refuses to Go Away
Nirmala Sitharaman’s budget may please markets and reassure elites. It may win applause in boardrooms and television studios.
Outside those insulated spaces, a far more urgent question persists: Can the poor eat the budget document for breakfast? Until that question is answered – not with rhetoric, but with food, jobs, and dignity – no claim of growth or progress deserves to be taken seriously.
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Ranjan Solomon is a writer, researcher and activist based in Goa. He has worked in social movements since he was 19 years of age. The views expressed here are the author’s own and Clarion India does not necessarily share or subscribe to them. He can be contacted at ranjan.solomon@gmail.com
