NEW DELHI: The Centre has presented the Union Budget keeping in mind the 2024 parliamentary elections, said Samajwadi Party MP Dimple Yadav on Wednesday. "It's a Budget presented keeping the elections in mind. While the government has given some relaxations to the middle class, it has not said anything about the Minimum Support Price for farmers, employment and youth," Dimple Yadav told ANI after the House adjourned for the day.


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She further said that the budget has been "disappointing" and they have also ignored the Railways."Railways are also ignored in this budget. It has been a disappointing budget," Dimple Yadav added. Meanwhile, Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav also said that the budget of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led central government increases inflation and unemployment in the country.


"The BJP is completing a decade of its budget, when it did not give anything to the public earlier, what can we expect now? The BJP's budget increases inflation and unemployment. No hope of the farmers, labourers, youth, women, job professionals," he said. Akhilesh Yadav, later, shared a video of a lion [apparently a hungry lion] and captioned it as saying that the hungry lion is angry because the BJP has neither made any arrangement for his survival nor has it established any manufacturing unit in Uttar Pradesh in the last 10 years. 



"Perhaps this hungry lion of Etawah Lion Safari is angry because the BJP government has neither given the right budget for its food and maintenance nor has it set up any manufacturing unit in UP to advocate for its Make-in-India programme in the last 10 years," he tweeted along with a video. 


Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented the Union Budget 2023 today in Lok Sabha. This was the third time in a row that the government presented the budget in a paperless form.


Highlights of the budget presented by the Union Finance Minister included big incentives under the new income tax regime. The IT rebate limit in the new regime has been increased from Rs 5 lakh to Rs 7 lakh and the new tax regime will be the default tax regime, the Finance Minister said. Capital expenditure outlay has been increased by 33 per cent to Rs 10 lakh crore, accounting for 3.3 per cent of the GDP. 


Sitharaman started her Budget speech at 11 am, the last full Budget of the Modi government in its second term. Like the previous two Union Budgets, Union Budget 2023-24 is also presented in paperless form. 


This year's Budget holds much significance as the country is scheduled to have the next Lok Sabha election in April-May 2024. As per established tradition, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman along with ministers of state Pankaj Chaudhary and Bhagwat Karad and Finance Secretary T V Somanathan called on President Droupadi Murmu. 


The budget session of the Parliament began on Tuesday with President's address, subsequently tabling the Economic Survey for 2022-23. The formal exercise to prepare the annual Budget for the next financial year (2023-24) commenced on October 10.The Economic Survey, tabled in the Parliament on Tuesday, noted India's GDP is expected to grow in the range of 6 to 6.8 per cent in the coming financial year 2023-24. This is in comparison to the estimated 7 per cent this fiscal and 8.7 per cent in 2021-22.