Anita Subhadarshini, BJP MP, Aska (Odisha), raises question over Aska constituency being deprived of the railway service. She questions, “When will a final DPR will be sanctioned for the project?” 

Replying to the question, Ashwini Vaishnaw, Union Railway Minister says, “The funds allocation and progress of work in Odisha has seen huge increase in the last 10 years.” 

Mr. Vaishnaw says during the UPA regime, the funds allocated for a large and important state like Odisha was just ₹800 crore. He says, “Now the funds allocated are more than ₹10,000 crore every year for Odisha which is a huge jump from the previous years.”

Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman with team members shows the Budget paper before leaving for Rashtrapati Bhavan, at North Block in New Delhi on July 23, 2024.
| Photo Credit: SHIV KUMAR PUSHPAKAR

The Union Cabinet, headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, approved the full Budget for 2024-25, sources said. Following this, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will present her seventh budget in the Lok Sabha.

Follow the LIVE Budget updates here

Ms. Sitharaman, India’s first full-time woman Finance Minister, has presented five full budgets since July 2019 and an interim budget on February 1, 2024.

This is the first budget of the BJP-led NDA government in its third term in office.

Earlier today, Ms. Sitharaman called on President Droupadi Murmu before presenting the full Budget for 2024-25. As per established tradition, the Finance Minister met the President at the Rashtrapati Bhavan before heading to Parliament.

President Murmu offered ‘dahi-chini’ (curd-sugar), considered auspicious, to Ms. Sitharaman before she left for Parliament to present the Union Budget.

Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman speaks in the Rajya Sabha during the Budget session of Parliament, in New Delhi on Febuary 10, 2024.
| Photo Credit: PTI

The United Progressive Alliance (UPA) squandered the opportunity to implement the unfinished reforms agenda from 1991 during its decade in office, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said in the Rajya Sabha on Saturday, accusing the Manmohan Singh government of “thorough mismanagement” after the global financial crisis.

Citing a Tamil proverb “Mullu Mel Potta Thuni Mathiri” (Like a cloth placed on thorns) in response to a discussion on the White Paper on the Economy, Ms. Sitharaman said the Narendra Modi government had to carefully extricate India’s economy out of the thorns the UPA had tangled it in, without ripping its fabric.

“The economy was like a piece of cloth on that thorny bush, the thorns were all those malpractices that had torn into the economy. The whole world was using the phrase Fragile Five for all of us. What was the level of fragility? From the bottom, you were within the first five,” she said.

“After all, you [UPA] inherited a very good economy from the Atal Behari Vajpayee government. And maybe in your first five years, you tried benefiting the people with that good economy. But subsequently, and unfortunately, after the global financial crisis, it was thorough mismanagement,” the Minister said.

Stressing that the White Paper was being brought out now “after 10 years of toiling to bring the economy back on track”, Ms. Sitharaman said it would serve as a record for posterity, when the intent was not good and transparency was not there in the economy. “We need to have clean and accountable governance, not governance through extra-constitutional bodies,” she remarked.

She reminded the House that the first Cabinet decisions under Mr. Modi were the formation of a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to remove black money and the Expenditure Reforms Commission under Bimal Jalan “so that profligate expenditure of the earlier government could be rationalised”.

Referring to former PM Singh, Ms. Sitharaman said that the “promised reforms of 1991 were not complete and “when there was an opportunity again between 2004 and 2014, no reforms” were undertaken.

“It is one thing to continuously tell us what have you done… What have you done on the two-track approach, which is required for the train to go forward, one to remove the malpractices’ impact on the economy and to not only carry forward those pending reforms, which have been waiting from 1991, but also even further to take the economy forward. So, that is the track which we laid for ourselves,” she said.

Dismissing Congress MP K.C. Venugopal’s charge that the demonetisation of high-value currency notes in late 2016 had wiped out India’s Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs), the Minister said as many as 3.16 crore MSMEs were registered on the Udyam platform as of December 4, 2023, and urged the Opposition to do “some more homework”.