India budget 2023: A recap of last year’s promises

Key takeaways: 

• The Indian government will present the India budget 2023 on Wednesday before the nation holds elections in 2024.

We’ve seen official data to see what improvement the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has vowed in the India Budget 2023 since last year’s budget.

Economic development and spending commitments: 

In her 2022 funding, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman stated that India’s economic development in the current fiscal year (to the end of March 2023) was “calculated to be 9.2%, [the] highest among all large economies”.

But with worries of an international recession and energy costs increasing after the fighting in Ukraine, that growth projection was adjusted down to 6.8% last December by India’s central bank.

Construction of houses under the government’s housing scheme: 

In the fiscal year from 1 April 2022, there’s a report up to 23 January 2023. This reveals 1.2 million houses were constructed in urban places, while under the rural part of the scheme, 2.6 million homes were made.

That means the government is presently 4.2 million houses short of its target altogether.

The finance minister also gave 600bn rupees ($74bn; £60bn) with an “ambition to cover 38 million households in 2022-23” piped water connections.

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Road building slows down: 

The finance minister even announced last year that the national highways network would be “extended by 25,000km (15,534 miles) in 2022-23”.

The 25,000km would have new construction, the expansion of existing routes, and the declaration of state highways as national highways.

The ministry of road transport and highways established itself as a target to construct 12,000km (7,456 miles) this fiscal year.

But the newest data from the ministry reveals that only a sum of 5,774km (3,588 miles) of national highways was made between April and December 2022 – less than half the mark. We still need data for January this year.

Going by data from earlier years, simple construction has been delayed this year to about an average of 21km (13 miles) a day from 29km a day in 2021-22 and 37km a day on average in 2020-21.