Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s marathon Budget 2020 speech that ran into two hours and 40 minutes with proposals covering all sectors of the economy seems to have gone down well with people, with majority of them giving it the highest approval rating in the last eight years.
According to an IANS-CVoter post-budget poll, a majority of the respondents has given the Budget 2020-21 a rating of 7.1 on a scale of 1-10. This is the highest rating a budget has got since 2013, when the budget proposals of the UPA government got a rating of mere 4.4.
The high rating for the budget 2020-21 is largely on account of budget proposals regarding tax incentives for the salaried class and the rural economy, including infrastructure sectors.
The post-budget poll noted that 2020 approval rating of 7.1 even surpassed the first budget of Modi 2.0 last year which got a rating of 7.0. In fact, ever since coming to power in 2014, the budget rating of the Modi government has remained in the healthy zone.
The survey said that while the budget of 2014 got an approval rating of 4.8, it moved up to 6.6 the next year. The decline started thereafter with rating falling to 6.3 in 2016, 5.2 in 2017 and 4.7 in 2018.
The failure of the budget rating in later part of Modi 1.0 was largely on account of falling economic parameters and price rise that impacted the common people. The rise in unemployment also cast a shadow on the budget exercise that only provided limited avenues to address the issues.
The survey, conducted on Saturday after Sitharaman’s speech ended, had a sample size of 1,200 randomly selected respondents across all demographies.