Defensive strokes, no balls in Budget, says Shashi Tharoor

New Delhi: Making full use of cricketing lingo, Congress leader and Lok Sabha MP Shashi Tharoor described the Union Budget as a damp squib with a lot of “unnecessarily defensive strokes, dropped catches and quite a few no balls”.

Initiating the discussion on the Budget in the lower house, Mr Tharoor on Monday, slammed the government for allegedly not addressing key issues facing the economy, including farm distress, and rising fuel prices. He even interspersed his 45-minute speech with a lot of Urdu couplets, including those from eminent poet Mirza Ghalib.

“Since cricket is on our minds these days with World Cup semi-final tomorrow, let me say that instead of bold boundaries we expected in this first budget after the elections, what we have are unnecessarily defensive strokes, drop catches and quite a few no-balls and wide,” the Congress leader said.

Mediocre announcements, distinctive misses, and defining silences of matter of substance, were the hallmark of the budget, he summed up.  “We were left with a sort of ‘trishank’' budget, neither here nor there,” the MP said.

There was hardly any mention of country's GDP growth rate, he said, adding that the word ‘GDP’ came up only once.

“Hastily and ill thought through demonetisation bears the large share of responsibility for shutting down lakhs of small and micro enterprises, throwing many more lakhs of people out of work,” Mr Tharoor alleged.

Mr Tharoor also raised the issue of agrarian distress and farmer suicides.

“Our farmers who provide food security have in the last five years received stepmotherly treatment form this government which has resulted in the record level of farmer suicides,” he alleged.

The PM Kisan Samman Nidhi in its current form is away from the reality of the acute agrarian crisis the country is facing, Mr Tharoor said, referring to the scheme of providing Rs 6,000 per year cash transfer to small and marginal farmers.