The morning after the Budget presentation, and the finance minister is seen scrambling on the floor of the House to explain what can only be termed as a crude blunder. True, mathematics and politics do not easily go together, especially in these days when popular votes are so closely linked to the price of essential goods, but the least the country can expect of its finance minister is that he gets his sums right. On Budget day, Yashwant Sinha had announced to the world that he was introducing a cess of Re 1 on every litre of petrol sold, without quite having calculated that in actual terms this amounted to an increase of Rs 4. While Sinha preferred to be euphemistic and termed it as ``confusion'', there is no getting away from the fact that someone, somewhere had blundered and blundered badly. While the Finance Ministry mandarins may point fingers at the Petroleum Ministry mandarins and vice versa in the best traditions of the British comedy series, Yes, Minister, the man who really emerged with crude on hisface was the unfortunate Sinha, much to the delight of the Opposition benches.Indeed, the minister must bear responsibility for the slip-up for having blithely assumed that the adjustments in the pricing of petrol could be calibrated in a manner that would place no additional burden on the consumer, even as the Petroleum Ministry had announced an increase of around Rs 4 after taking into consideration the Rs 960 crore loss of revenue on account of the five per cent cut in the import duty on crude oil. What's more, much after the finance minister's retraction, his bureaucrats had still not decided how the additional burden was to be absorbed - whether it should be computed as part of the oil pool deficit or accounted for by cross subsidisation. Sinha's must be the quickest retraction of a Budget announcement in the history of the Lok Sabha. As if to compound the blunder, the minister found himself on the back foot over urea prices as well - which would now, as he hastily informed the House, be hiked onlyby 50 paise per kg, and not Re 1 as announced earlier. Besides misleading the House and the nation, these developments also strained Parliamentary propriety a great deal because, constitutionally speaking, the Finance Bill, once it is presented on the floor of the House, becomes the property of Parliament and any alterations to the document requires the consent of its members.Finally, it is the consumer who has to pay the heaviest price for ministerial and bureaucratic bungling. Within hours of the Petroleum Ministry's announcement, commuters all over the country were made to cough up at the enhanced rates. Given the fact that around 15,000 tonnes of petrol is sold nationally everyday, this means that, on an average, consumers have paid around Rs 5 crore extra for this mix-up. While that may be a small amount for the Finance Ministry since it thinks in terms of hundreds of thousands of crores, the same cannot be said for the consumer. So how is the ordinary person now to be compensated for the extra moneyhe or she had to shell out thanks to the finance minister's poor calculating abilities? Will Yashwant Sinha please explain?
