India's ruling coalition set about selling its vote-catching pre-election budget on Wednesday, as the election commission discussed the dates of an early poll.
Finance Minister Jaswant Singh's interim budget on Tuesday has been generally welcomed by commentators for its political shrewdness and fiscal gains, although many point out those gains stem more from a booming economy than structural reform.
Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are campaigning heavily on economic management in their bid for re-election, which opinion polls show they will win.
Parliament is due to be dissolved this week and election commission officials were to meet on Wednesday to discuss dates fore voting, likely to be staggered over several days in April and possibly into May. A decision is expected within a week.
The budget, offering crucial rural and middle class voters a range of modest give-aways with the promise of more to come if the BJP-led coalition is returned, comes on top of billions of dollars worth of other popular measures, including indirect tax cuts.
Singh and several key ministers, including Defence Minister George Fernandes, will make a series of public appearances on Wednesday and the lower house is due to vote on the interim budget in the evening.
"This is a popular, pre-election mode budget," commentator Tarun Vijay wrote in The Financial Express. "But if people are benefited and a vision is made clear, what's the problem?"
The budget includes money for new hospitals, a programme to tackle chronic clean water shortages in the cities and subsidies for food grains for poor rural families.
It also promises help for agricultural industries, such as tea and sugar, and more spending and cheap credit for the farm sector - which supports about 70 percent of India's one billion people and accounts for 25 percent of Gross Domestic Product.
Buoyed by bumper crops after the best monsoon in a decade and booming consumer spending, Singh ramped up his growth forecast for the year to March to 7.5-8.0 percent from more than seven, and said he expected eight percent again in 2004/05.
The budget's biggest surprise was a better-than-expected fall in the growth of the worrisome fiscal deficit to 4.8 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2003/04 from previous estimates of 5.6 percent, and a further reduction to 4.4 percent next fiscal year.
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