FM promises support for business sectors tattered by pandemic

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By Ashish Mitra --
Saturday, 19 Dec, 2020

Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman has promised to invest more to strengthen India’s health infrastructure and support industries in the coming Union budget.

Addressing business leaders at the Confederation of Indian Industry’s (CII) virtual Partnership Summit, Sitharaman described her third budget in February to be presented in the long shadow of the pandemic as a ‘never before’ event and promised to give abundant attention to all the suggestions she has got.

Her emphasis was more on higher healthcare spending and supporting the industries such as hospitality and aviation indicate the general direction of the next budget. “Investment in health is going to be absolutely critical, not just to make lives safer but also to make health and health-related expenditure more predictable for people and not to do it out of pocket,” she said.

She also said that while the rural economy showed resilience during the pandemic, urban India offered a lesson about where it could not take the shock. Cities witnessed a massive reverse migration following the stringent lockdown imposed in March, leading to a humanitarian crisis.

The Centre has so far announced three stimulus packages amounting to Rs24.3 lakh crore. While the manufacturing sector has recovered in the September quarter from the 39.3 per cent contraction seen in the June quarter, trade, hotels, transport, communication and services related to broadcasting are still running negatively, according to a data released last month.

India’s economy slowed its pace of contraction to 7.5 per cent in Q2. For the Centre, a major challenge is to create an adequate number of jobs amid work increasingly becoming technology-driven and automated.

The Finance Minister said that the way in which jobs are being created will go through a massive change with ‘working from home’ becoming a culture. Continued and justifiable anxiety that women’s participation in the workforce is not adequate needed to be looked at, she said.

FM promises support for business sectors tattered by pandemic. Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman has promised to invest more to strengthen India’s health infrastructure and support industries in the coming Union budget.

Addressing business leaders at the Confederation of Indian Industry’s (CII) virtual Partnership Summit, Sitharaman described her third budget in February to be presented in the long shadow of the pandemic as a ‘never before’ event and promised to give abundant attention to all the suggestions she has got.

Her emphasis was more on higher healthcare spending and supporting the industries such as hospitality and aviation indicate the general direction of the next budget. “Investment in health is going to be absolutely critical, not just to make lives safer but also to make health and health-related expenditure more predictable for people and not to do it out of pocket,” she said.

She also said that while the rural economy showed resilience during the pandemic, urban India offered a lesson about where it could not take the shock. Cities witnessed a massive reverse migration following the stringent lockdown imposed in March, leading to a humanitarian crisis.

The Centre has so far announced three stimulus packages amounting to Rs24.3 lakh crore. While the manufacturing sector has recovered in the September quarter from the 39.3 per cent contraction seen in the June quarter, trade, hotels, transport, communication and services related to broadcasting are still running negatively, according to a data released last month.

India’s economy slowed its pace of contraction to 7.5 per cent in Q2. For the Centre, a major challenge is to create an adequate number of jobs amid work increasingly becoming technology-driven and automated.

The Finance Minister said that the way in which jobs are being created will go through a massive change with ‘working from home’ becoming a culture. Continued and justifiable anxiety that women’s participation in the workforce is not adequate needed to be looked at, she said.