Nothing exciting in budget, say Mumbaikars

Mumbai: The union budget 2013-14 presented Thursday that primised to be growth and investment oriented, some Mumbaikars felt, was unimpressive and there was nothing exciting in it. Sunaina Thakkar, a homemaker and mother of two, said: "I tried my best to find a silver lining, but there isn`t any."

"How is talking about growth or investments or levying taxes on the rich going to help people like me? The (finance) minister has to realise that there are only a few thousands of rich and they are not the only ones," she said. Deep Vora, a software engineer, said: "For me, this budget was a non-event. I have always looked forward to the budget and religiously followed it every year. But this year, there is nothing that interests me, neither in terms of tax benefits nor any other sops." Agreed chartered accountant Maulin Desai, adding that the sops were only for the rich, not for the middle income groups. "I think the TDS levied on the immovable property transactions above Rs.50 lakh will encourage pumping in more black money as buyer will hesitate to pay tax on that transaction," he said. Criticising the home loan deduction for property worth less than Rs.25 lakh, another chartered accountant, Maria A.S. said that most of the current and prospective property owners residing in metros will not benefit from the proposal as property prices are way above this ceiling. Kishor Tiwari of Vidarbha Jan Andolan Samiti, a farmer advocacy group, said it was disappointing to note that the plight of farmers from the drought-ridden and suicide-prone Vidarbha region in Maharashtra has been completely ignored. "Announcing thousands of crores of rupees for the agriculture ministry is not going to help. Specific relief funding is the need of the hour, which has not even been mentioned," Tiwari said. "The basic issues of national agrarian crisis are the rise in cost of chemical inputs, market volatility of rates, minimum support price and poor government intervention. Wrong allocation of budget in agriculture is adding fuel to crisis," he added. IANS