Do it yourself

  Prologue: If you find these observations completely trivial, that is precisely the idea. The budget speech and most of the promises made thereunder sound trivial, lacking specifics. As expected, the budget speech of the finance minister, while presenting the last full budget of the union government before the next general election, sounded like an election manifesto. The finance minister counted the achievements made in the past nine years (since 2014) of her party’s government; and made many promises for the future, totally lacking on specifics. Perhaps for the first time in the history of independent India, the finance minister used “We will” and “will be” to make all the budget proposals. The general convention has been to say “I propose to” or “is proposed”. Besides, the nomenclatures of an overwhelming number of central sector schemes now use “PM” as prefix. It is obvious that the central government is too conscious to ensure that the electorate must know that the benef...

In a recently published paper, RBI has highlighted some interesting trends in the financial savings of the Indian household. The financial savings of household are considered very important given that they are the key providers of the capital to the Indian economy. Household savings have traditionally financed the fiscal deficit of the governments and also provided a stable source of short to midterm funding to the corporates. Study of trends in household finances is therefore considered most important to understand the growth dynamics of Indian economy. The key highlights of the paper could be listed as follows: 1.    The net household savings declined to 6.5% of GDP in FY19 from 7.7% in FY18. This was mostly due to higher household expenditure and larger borrowings. In FY20 net savings have rebounded to 7.7%, mainly due to sharp decline in financial liabilities of households. 2.         Gross financial assets of India...