Budget 2016 to be citizen-centric: Jayant Sinha

The upcoming Budget 2016 will be citizen-centric with a focus on the farm sector, job creation and eradication of poverty, Minister of State for Finance Jayant Sinha said on Saturday.

This will be the second full-fledged budget of the ruling NDA government, and will be unveiled in Parliament on February 29.

"We are working very hard in the Finance Ministry to be able to prepare a budget that will truly eradicate poverty, provide prosperity for our farmers, help in massive job creation for young people and provide a better quality of life for all Indian citizens," Sinha said.

In his pre-Budget message on Finance Ministry's YouTube channel, the minister said the Budget 2016 will be forward-looking "that will ensure that India continues to be a haven for stability and growth in a very turbulent global environment".

The Ministry of Finance tweeted on Twitter:

#Budget2016
Watch the Pre-Budget message of MoS (Finance)Shri @jayantsinha .https://t.co/2l2gT1jTPS

— Ministry of Finance (@FinMinIndia) February 20, 2016

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley's core Budget 2016 team includes Sinha, Finance Secretary Ratan Watal, Economic Affairs Secretary Shaktikanta Das, Revenue Secretary Hasmukh Adhia, Disinvestment Secretary Neeraj Gupta and Financial Services Secretary Anjuly Chib Duggal.

The upcoming budget will be third by Jaitley, including the interim budget of July 2014.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has kept India's growth projection unchanged at 7.3% in the current fiscal and 7.5% in the next fiscal. As for the world growth, the IMF forecast is 3.4% for 2016 and 3.6% for 2017.