Union Budget 2020 LIVE: Major Relief For Taxpayers, Tax Slabs Rejigged

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will present the Union Budget before the Lok Sabha at 11 am on Saturday. This will be the second budget of the re-elected government of Prime  Minister Narendra Modi. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will look to kickstart the economy while attempting a balancing act between growth and fiscal prudence.

The fiscal deficit, from April to November, is already at 115% of the budgeted deficit, which is at 3.3% of GDP. Unemployment is at a 45-year high according to the Periodic Labour Force Survey, pegging the unemployment rate for 2017 - 2018 at 6.1%. India's growth in the second quarter of financial year 2019 - 2020 stood at 4.5%, the lowest in six years, with the Reserve Bank of India cutting India's growth forecasts for the ongoing financial year from 6.1% to just 5%. Institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the State Bank of India (SBI) too have followed suit, having cut India's growth projections in their own forecasts. In December 2019, official data showed inflation at 7.35%, breaching the Reserve Bank Of India's medium-term upper ceiling of retail inflation of 6%. This figure was at a three-year high, being driven primarily by food inflation, which rose at 14.12% in December.

The budget also comes at a time when the government has taken disinvestment decisions to shore up its finance, such as putting 100% of Air India up for sale and giving incentives for investment by cutting corporation tax, up to 10 percentage points for corporations.

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