The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) is confident its track record in delivering development to over 500 million Indians in the last decade will win them a third consecutive term in the upcoming general election, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said.

“There is actual development reaching the ground. There is no appeasement. There is no differentiating people; no denying people. Everybody gets everything that the bracket of people should get; in that, no caste, no religion, no nothing,” Sitharaman said in her first post-Budget interview granted to Doordarshan on 1 February, before adding, “As a result you will find that in the last 10 years, we have actually laid the foundation for people to now think in terms of meeting their aspirations.”

Sitharaman’s budget speech, the shortest in recent memory, delivered a month ahead of the start of the general election cycle was strikingly shorn of populism.

This contrasts with 2019, when the NDA facing a strident opposition was forced to declare a yearly stipend to farmers and roll out income tax sops for the lower middle class.

Not since Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first prime minister has India witnessed a government being re-elected under the same leader for three consecutive terms.

The NDA’s confidence of a re-election was renewed by PM Modi, the day after the Budget. Delivering the inaugural address for the Mobility exhibition in New Delhi, the PM referred to a third term in passing.

Responding to the loud response from the audience, he cheekily remarked: “Samajdhar ko ishaara hi kaafi hai (Intelligent people can read mere signals).”

This pre-poll confidence is inspired by the government’s track record in delivering tangible social welfare to over 500 million Indians in the last decade. At the same time, the disarray among the opposition parties, unlike in the run-up to the 2019 general election, improves the odds for NDA.

Agreeing that this new cohort of Labarthis or beneficiaries were now part of the formal economy and stakeholders in economic growth, Sitharaman said that this would manifest in greater consumption to match their growing aspirations.

“It will be the trigger point for any future consumption. Not just of necessities like food products. But consumption of services like education; not as corporate education, instead seeking skills, seeking knowledge, seeking opportunity,” she said.

Further, the FM argued that in the last decade the NDA had undertaken “substantial systemic reforms” that emphasized “empowerment”—as opposed to the strategy of entitlement pursued by their predecessor, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA).

“We have taken the route of empowering people and not going by entitlement. That is why when houses reach people, electricity reaches people, you also have money coming through Direct Benefit Transfer; you financially empower them.”

According to the finance minister, the big difference the NDA’s approach to development was to pivot to targeting individual households as opposed to villages and preferring to measure success in outcomes over outlay. To achieve this, the NDA deployed a delivery architecture that identified the beneficiary by triangulating their Jandhan (bank account), Aadhaar and Mobile or JAM.

“The emphasis that we are laying on being fiscally prudent without affecting our schemes, without denying funds anywhere, and by avoiding wastage. That is why we repeatedly talk about DBT (direct benefit transfer) and what it is given as a saving. Rs2.75 lakh crore would have gone to waste, and no one would have known where it has gone, because it was going to unborn children, going to dead people, going to people who don’t exist in the village, and so on,” she said, before adding, “So, when you brought in technology and synchronised it with biometric validation, you were able to save money. So, our prudence is not on just cutting expenditure, but improving revenue and avoiding wastage of taxpayers’ money. That is why today we’ve bettered our fiscal deficit numbers for this year and next year as well.”

The fiscal deficit or gross borrowings numbers disclosed by the FM in Parliament on 1 February surprised on the upside.

For the current fiscal, 2023-24, the revised fiscal deficit as a percentage of gross domestic product is 5.8%– compared to 5.9% projected last year. For 2024-25,

Sitharaman has projected a fiscal deficit of 5.1%, which leaves it well placed to achieve its commitment to reduce the deficit below 4.5% in 2025-26.

According to Sitharaman, the Indian economy has diversified in the last decade with the private sector expanding its footprint.

“(There are) newer areas of activity, where people earlier wouldn’t want to tread, are now opening opportunities.

Space is a classic example. India’s space industry has been there for a long time, doing well for a long time. It’s not as if they have succeeded only now, but the energy with which it is growing and the components that can be given by private participation — startups contributing to the space sector are giving them that multiplier that they wouldn’t have had earlier. As a result, what is happening is that the contribution to GDP is coming from areas that earlier did not even exist.”

Sitharaman claimed that the budget proposal to set up a technological fund with a corpus of Rs1 lakh crore would be a force multiplier for grassroots innovation.

“I have announced the amount, and along with that, they will also seek private participation. If it is not there, for identified projects, assistance will also be provided in the private sector. When money comes cheaply, they also get the opportunity to provide business cheaply. So yes, I believe it is a major step forward. Within the next five years, there will be many small innovations, big innovations.”

Asked to sum up her government’s development ideology, the finance minister said,

“This is sarvavyapi (omnipresent) and sarvasparshee (all-pervasive) development and it is also an ideology of the BJP. Everyone in the BJP knows that the party should be comprehensive and all-inclusive…and whatever programme we are doing by the government, we are doing it for sarvangeen (all-round) development.

This is our mantra, our basic principle.” – Anil Padmanabhan is a senior journalist based in New Delhi