Opposition on Budget 2026: Blind to real crises, fails test of economic strategy
Lok Sabha LOP Rahul Gandhi said it was a “Budget that refuses course correction, blind to India’s real crises”.
Addressing a press conference at the AICC office in Delhi, former finance minister P Chidambaram said he isn’t sure “if the government and the Finance Minister had read the Economic Survey 2025-26”. “If they had, it appears they have decided to discard it completely,” he said.
Opposition parties hit out at the Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman for “ignoring” common people’s problems, with the Congress saying that her speech and the document “fail the test of economic strategy and economic statesmanship”.
Addressing a press conference at the AICC office in Delhi, former finance minister P Chidambaram said he isn’t sure “if the government and the Finance Minister had read the Economic Survey 2025-26”. “If they had, it appears they have decided to discard it completely,” he said.
He listed 10 challenges identified by the Economic Survey and experts, including the “penal tariffs imposed by the United States”, “protracted trade conflicts that will weigh on investment”; and the growing trade deficit, especially with China; and said that none of this “was addressed by the Finance Minister’s speech”.
The other challenges he spoke about included the “low Gross Fixed Capital Formation (approx 30 per cent) and the reluctance of the private sector to invest; the uncertain outlook for the flow of FDI (foreign direct investment) into India and the persistent outflow of FPI for the last several months.
He also mentioned the persistent gap between officially announced inflation numbers and the ground realities in terms of bills for household expenditure, education, healthcare and transport and the “closure of lakhs of MSMEs and the struggle for survival of the remaining MSMEs”.
“None of this was addressed by the Finance Minister’s speech,” said Chidambaram.
He said that even by an accountant’s standards, it was a poor account of the management of the finances in 2025-26.
He said that in revenue expenditure, the cuts have fallen in heads that concern the common people.
Lok Sabha LOP Rahul Gandhi said it was a “Budget that refuses course correction, blind to India’s real crises”.
Other Opposition parties also criticised the Budget, with Samajwadi Party’s Rajya Sabha member Ramji Lal Suman saying that rural India and especially farmers have been ignored.
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee described the Union Budget as “directionless, visionless and anti-people”, and that it has nothing on offer for her state.
Criticising the Centre for “ignoring” Tamil Nadu in the Union Budget, Chief Minister M K Stalin said it “was a huge disappointment to the state”.
“As Tamil Nadu gears for the Assembly elections, we expected at least this year that the state would be visible to the eyes of the Union BJP government and our voices will be heard by them. However, this year too, the BJP government has delivered only disappointment,” he said in a statement.
CPI Rajya Sabha member P Sandosh Kumar said the Finance Minister’s speech revealed a “deliberate political choice to look away from people’s hardships while concentrating power and resources in fewer hands”.
Slamming the Budget, Kerala, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has deliberately forgotten the fact that Kerala, too, is “on India’s map”.
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