New Delhi: Finance minister Arun Jaitley, by reading his Budget speech bilingually, defied convention as no finance minister since the inception of the Budget exercise has spoken in Hindi at length.
Mr Jaitley, who started his Budget speech in English, quickly switched over to Hindi the moment he came to the chapter on agriculture and rural economy. In other words, the populist measures were all read out in Hindi.
With the focus of the NDA government’s last full Bud-get prior to the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, being completely on the rural poor and providing sops to farmers, the finance minister read the entire chapter in Hindi, before switching over to English while reading later chapters. The move, as reported by this newspaper on January 31, was aimed at sending a signal to the farmers that it is the common man’s Budget.
Meanwhile, there were several sidelights during Mr Jaitley’s speech, as he quipped “Ab hawai chappal wale bhi hawai jahaz mein ja payenge,” while speaking on the small town connectivity scheme of the civil aviation ministry.
The moment the finance minister started reading out paragraphs on boosting the food processing sector, TMC MP Saugata Roy quip-ped that “making pakodas should also be encouraged”.
He was taking a jibe at PM Modi’s recent comment when he had said that small-level entrepreneurial jobs were on the rise and had given the example of how ‘pakoda sellers’ had spawned across country.
Mr Modi was present in Lok Sabha during the presentation of the Budget.
However there was no reaction from the treasury benches over Mr Roy’s comments, even as Opposition members could be seen laughing.
