Jagdish Madan in a pre-budget summing up of the economic and political situation in the country, looks at some crucial issues:

…rural employment plan, which guarantees 100 days of work for one person in every poor household, was the priority of the government. The plan was the government’s attempt to address some of the countryside’s biggest problems – poverty and unemployment. Having already spent some $3bn on this scheme over the last two years, its performance has not met any rural expectations. Obviously the implementation of the scheme was riddled with corruption and has been anything but perfect.

Rising Food Prices.While the middle class is relatively immune to such price rises, for almost half of India’s population that lives on less than $2 a day, it is vital for the government to keep prices in check.

Ajay Shah is depressed:

What do I think is going on? I think the UPA got started with one big idea: to do a massive expansion of welfare programs. The spending is underway, but it hasn’t been delivering results. The `flagship programs of the UPA’ aren’t working too well, and the UPA isn’t winning elections. Desperate measures suggest desperate times. This debt waiver program is a desperate effort at trying to somehow get State money to some voters. They are unwilling to question the holy cows of how education, health or poverty programs work. So they’re down to this. I think it suggests elections in October 2008.

Some issues raised by Ananthakrishnan managed to depress me:

Many will be justified in their disappointment that even in this last full budget of its present term, the UPA could not move closer to the widely discussed allocations that both these sectors need as a percentage of GDP — six per cent in Education and two to three per cent in Health (even the World Bank, not the most benevolent of organisations, deplores our low government health spending).

Jo presents a long list of ‘highlights‘.

Shael Sharma, unmoved by the budget, moves onto Web 2.0:

The media is awash with the Union Budget news and I don’t seem to agree with anything that is being sold by various economists, interest groups, lobbyists and politicians. As is won’t, this promises to be an election budget with populist measures that will whittle away tax payers money (yes this usually represents a third of your income on the pay slip!) in rubbish schemes but nothing can make me unhappy today. I am surprisingly happy considering the fact that there is really no good news!

Abi does some live blogging on the Budget in the morning, and checks the higher education allocations in the evening:

Last year, the IITs were allocated a whopping Rs. 1111 crores under Plan spending — this represents fixed, one-time costs for infrastructure, equipment, etc. This figure is referred to as the Budget Estimate (BE-07). But, they are estimated to have spent only 335 crores (Revised Estimate, RE-07)! If you look at this year’s allocation, it appears to be way out of line with the actual performance: BE-08 is back up at 1020 crores!

The story is the same for IISc. The corresponding figures are 196 (BE-07), 40 (RE) and 130 (BE-08) crores. For the IIMs, they are 103, 43 and 88 crores.

So, what’s going on?