Congress raises chants of Bharat Jodo during Budget presentation

| Updated: 01 February, 2023 11:45 am IST

As Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman began giving her Budget speech on Wednesday, some members of the Opposition raised chants of Bharat Jodo. Sitharaman continued her speech without getting perturbed.

“This is the first budget of Amritkal,” Sitharaman Said.

India will grow at 7 percent despite global economic slowdown, said the Finance Minister.

The Finance Minister posed with the trademark “bahi khata”, which has wrapped inside it the iPad out of which the Finance Minister reads her budget speech.

Earlier, Union Minister of Finance and Corporate Affairs Nirmala Sitharaman, MoS Dr Bhagwat Kishanrao Karad, MoS Pankaj Chaudhary and senior officials of the Ministry of Finance called on President Droupadi Murmu at Rashtrapati Bhavan before presenting the Union Budget 2023-24.

On Tuesday, several leaders of Congress gave the Presidents’s speech addressing a joint session of the Parliament on Day 1 of Budget Session a miss. They said that they were stuck due to poor weather conditions in Srinagar, where Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo yatra culminated.

Shashi Tharoor speaking to The New Indian denied reports of Congress leaders boycotting President Murmu’s speech. He clarified that several leaders of the party could not attend the address because of bad weather in Srinagar, where Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra culminated. “I don’t know about any boycott. Certainly, many of my colleagues were stuck in Srinagar. I couldn’t myself go because the flights were cancelled. Had I gone, I wouldn’t be back today. Sonia Gandhi was there, Adhir Ranjan Chaudhary was there. There were quite a few Congressmen there,” he said.

On his expectations from the budget, he said, “This year India will be the world’s fastest-growing. That’s not something that the government can expect us to celebrate by itself. We have to ask ourselves what they are doing about unemployment, what they are doing about price-rise, and whether are they making sure our youth will have a good future. I think the budget has to find some provisions to indicate that there is some concrete attention to the problems being faced by the people of our country,” he added.