New Delhi: India’s first female Finance Minister in almost five decades, Nirmala Sitharaman, who has held a wide range of jobs including Defence Minister, will present India’s full-year budget for the next fiscal (2019-20) in Parliament tomorrow morning at a time when she is under pressure to spend more to reinvigorate the economy.
Fifty-nine-year-old Sitharaman faces what might become one of the toughest balancing acts of her career. She must find resources for welfare programmes announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, including Rs. 87,000 crore for a new measure to support farmers. And, she must do all that while keeping the national deficit below 3.4% of GDP, a target credit rating companies are watching closely.
