The biggest disappointment has been the move to tax Provident Fund withdrawals. This is like rubbing salt in the wounds of a middle class that honestly pays its taxes.

The Union Budget-2016 is typical of the NDA government, strong on hype and short on substance. The Finance Minister has made a lot of statements, but one wonders how he would deliver on those. The Budget speech was resoundingly silent on the “how” aspect of the promises. For example, it is a very worthy objective to claim that farmers’ incomes can double in five years! But Mr Jaitley has not mentioned any concrete steps on how this income can go up so rapidly. For this to happen, farmers’ incomes would have to go up by almost 15 per cent per year, which is almost double the rate at which the GDP is expected to grow for the next few years. In view of the current macro-economic situation, as well as the cautionary notes issued by the Economic Survey, this kind of rapid growth looks unlikely. That is what betrays the NDA government’s lack of intent to fulfil the big promises.Farmers are already grappling with a vicious cycle of debt, stagnation of income and two consecutive bad monsoons. Under such circumstances it would have been reassuring to see the government increasing the crop insurance allocation, but that hasn’t happened. Likewise, the increase in the allotment for irrigation is also suspect. It has been done previously as well, but there was also a commensurate increase in the area under irrigation. States like Punjab need investment to upgrade the irrigation infrastructure, but there was no announcement to that effect.What is heartening to see is that the government has chosen to persist with the MNREGA. This is a good decision, though one cannot restrain oneself from pointing out that shortly after coming to power, the Prime Minister had rather boastfully claimed that the scheme epitomised all that was wrong with UPA policies. It would be unfair on my part to say that the government has done a U-turn, but it is good to see that it is persisting with some of the good polices of the UPA, including Aadhaar, which it had initially debunked.It is also good to observe that the Finance Minister has chosen to keep fiscal deficit at 3.5 per cent. However, it is unclear how this is going to be achieved. There is no mention of how the minister is going to adjust the implementation of the pay commission proposals. There has been no buoyancy in the collection of income tax and corporate tax in the first two years of the NDA government. So a suggestion that income and corporate tax collections would go up significantly this year needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. Moreover, the service tax has been left unchanged and corporate tax has been brought down; the GST still appears on a distant horizon; so one wonders if the fiscal target would be achieved.The biggest disappointment for me was the disastrous move to tax Provident Fund (PF) withdrawals. This is like rubbing salt in the wounds of a middle class that honestly pays taxes and is suffering an unstoppable inflation. While it would have been good of the Finance Minister to give some income tax exemptions, he has gone on to charge tax on as much as 60 per cent of the corpus of the PF withdrawals. The justification that the government wants the middle class to remain invested in pension annuity incomes, etc, to retain continuous saving is highly disingenuous. To attract the middle class to these schemes you don’t need to give them the fear of tax. You should be giving attractive savings interest rates to ensure that the money flows back into the economy, stimulating capital formation.Also, the government seems to have grossly underestimated the extent of the rot that exists in our public-sector banks. It would have been good to see a clear strategy and more aggressive laws hitting at defaulters and reducing the bad debt/non-performing assets (NPAs). It is shocking to know that the total NPAs of public-sector banks are more than the combined market capitalisation of these banks. It is obvious that we are sitting on dynamite. Under such circumstances, it would have been good to see aggressive bankruptcy norms, merging of small banks, performance indicators of public sector banks, reform in the boards of these banks, and infusion of private capital in them. None of this happened. The allocation of Rs 11,000 crore is paltry in view of the sheer extent of the problem in the banking sector.There has been no indication of the achievements of the much-touted Swachh Bharat Abhiyan or the Skill India Mission. Promises, we see, have been made liberally, while there is very little money visible to realise those.The writer is a member of the Congress and former Finance Minister of Punjab.