Coalition Budgets.

(From Business Today (India))

BUDGET 2004: P. Chidambaram unveils a clutch of sops for agriculture, increases ceiling on foreign direct investment in telecommunications, civil aviation, and insurance, focuses on the investment thingamajig and introduces an education cess but still manages to make everyone happy and reduce the fiscal deficit to 4.4 per cent of GDP. Between-the-lines message: I'm just warming up; now wait for next year.

BUDGET 2003: Jaswant Singh announces a big push (think: Rs 50,000 crore) for infrastructure, rationalises indirect taxes, increases ceiling on Foreign Direct Investment in banks from 49 per cent to 74 per cent, makes dividends tax-free in the hands of investors and actually manages to up the price of fertilisers (he eventually rolls back part of this), in the National Democratic Alliance's best budget ever.

BUDGET 2002: Yashwant Sinha goes all out and increases agricultural credit to Rs 75,000 crore (from Rs 64,000 crore), announces an accelerated rural electrification programme, provides concessions for private sector companies participating in infrastructure projects, decides to set up asset reconstruction companies, and rationalises indirect taxes. He is forced to roll back measures removing tax on dividends in the hands of investors and increasing the price of liquefied petroleum gas.

BUDGET 2001: In his finest hour yet, Yashwant Sinha announces a budget that reduces direct taxes, paves the way for a softer interest rate regime, increases the ceiling on foreign institutional investor (FII) holding in companies to 49 per cent, and touches upon sensitive second-generation reforms. Instantaneously, India's most pilloried Finance Minister becomes a sensation, although the outpouring of positive sentiment eventually results in nothing.

BUDGET 2000: P. Chidambaram may have set off the process of disinvestment but it is Yashwant Sinha who, in his third budget, first talks about reducing the government's ...