No relief for common man in Budget 2011: BJP

Terming the budget for 2011-12 as "unimaginative and visionless", the BJP today lamented that it had nothing to bring relief to the common man reeling under spiralling inflation or improve infrastructure.

Leader of the opposition in Rajya Sabha Arun Jaitley maintained that every budget should have "a big idea" but voiced disappointment that finance minister Pranab Mukherjee had only gone through a "routine packaging exercise".

"On the taxation front, Mukherjee knew that once the Direct Tax Code comes into effect the exemption limit would be made uniform at Rs2 lakh so he has given a rebate of Rs20,000 by raising tax exemption to Rs1.8 Lakh," he said.

He rued that nothing had been announced to improve infrastructure like ports and highways.

"I am disappointed over the directionless union budget which has failed to provide any relief to the common man reeling under severe inflation and sky-rocketing prices of all essential commodities," party president Nitin Gadkari said.

He maintained that the budget was devoid of any "concrete and effective policy guidelines" to generate employment.

"The finance minister has left it to the RBI to curb inflation and bail out the country from the mess created by the UPA government’s bad governance & wrong economic policies," Gadkari said.

Jaitley claimed that Mukherjee seemed to be going for the "art of the possible" by implementing DTC and dealing with Goods and Services Tax, Banking and Insurance in the next couple of years.

"The government would loose around Rs11,000 crore revenue due to the Rs 300 crore allocations done for several new initiatives. This would be made by from the services sector where taxes have been increased," Jaitley said.

On inflation, Jaitley said the government had not done enough to handle the supply side.

"There is no big picture or political leadership visible in this budget," he said.

He claimed that the growth rate of 8.6% was "illusionary".

"The services sector, where the government has little say, has grown by more than 6 per cent while the manufacturing sector had dipped. The agriculture sector had suffered the year before last and so the base had dipped which makes the growth figure of 5.4% look high," Jaitley said.

BJP insisted that had it not started a campaign against anomalies in 2G Spectrum allocation, the government would not have gone for auction in 3G which fetched a revenue of Rs67,000 crore. "This has brought down the fiscal deficit to some extent," a BJP leader said.

The increase in remuneration for anganwadi workers did not impress the BJP which described it as "drops in the ocean" and maintained they should be given full salaries.

Jaitley said the government had given a "heartless budget" as it levied taxes on hospitals. He lamented that the government had done nothing for the tourism sector which has the potential to provide big revenue as well as employment.

He suggested that government should have done away with ad valorem tax- taxation at each stage- on petroleum and instead gone for a fixed rate.