The Hindu : National : Budget will reflect basic tenets of CMP: Manmohan

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Tuesday, Jul 06, 2004

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Budget will reflect basic tenets of CMP: Manmohan

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI, JULY 5. The Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, today said the Union Budget would reflect the basic tenets of the Common Minimum Programme (CMP) as far as possible. At the same time, he regretted the "limited time" in which the new Government's first Budget had to be prepared. "As a result there are limitations to what we can do,'' said Dr. Singh.

As against the four months that are normally available to the Government to frame the Budget,the change in Government in the middle of the year, had forced the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) to condense the exercise to just one month, he said, speaking informally to media persons at the defence investiture ceremony at Rashtrapati Bhavan. Normally the framing of the Budget starts in November but the UPA Government had just one month.

Referring to his visit to Andhra Pradesh where he called on the families of farmers who had committed suicide, Dr. Singh said that it was necessary to introduce an "effective insurance mechanism'' to shield the farmers from the commercialisation of agriculture. "As agriculture becomes commercial, the farmer becomes more and more dependent on modern inputs taken on credit. Without an effective insurance mechanism, there are bound to be problems.'' He said that administrative problems also affected the well being of farmers. "That is a small part of the problem,'' he observed.

Dr. Singh said the country required modern agricultural techniques to promote dry land agriculture so as to increase the area under cultivation and thus partially ease the pressure on the land presently under cultivation. The Government would also have to pay attention to irrigation. "But there are limits to what the Central Government can do. In fact, the bulk of the CMP's tenets fall in the domain of the States,'' he said.

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