Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman is presenting the Union Budget 21-22 today (i.e. Monday, February 1) in the Parliament.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said India could have never imagined the health crisis that was about to unfold, in the form of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), earlier.
"The total impact of Atmanirbhar Bharat and measures by RBI was Rs 27.1 lakh crore, which amounts to 30% of the GDP," Sitharaman said.
She highlighted that government announced measures for the poor, the migrant workers, senior citizens, and children under various schemes.
"The announcements made earlier were like five mini-budgets themselves," Sitharaman said while announcing the Budget 2021.
Earlier on Friday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had also said that Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had to give four-five mini-budgets in the form of packages in 2020 and expressed confidence that the upcoming budget would also be seen as part of that series.
In his remarks to the media before the commencement of Parliament's Budget Session, Modi had said the first session of this decade commences on Friday and emphasised that this decade is very important for the bright future of India.
Earlier, Sitharaman and her team also met President Ram Nath Kovind before presenting her third budget on Monday. She was accompanied by her deputy Anurag Thakur and other officials of the Finance Ministry.
Dressed a crisp red-coloured saree with off-white detailing and gold border accompanied by Thakur and other officials from her ministry at North Block, the Finance Minister was seen carrying a tablet kept inside a red-coloured cover with a golden-coloured national emblem embossed on it.
With the Union Budget 2021-22 set to be delivered in paperless form for the first time, Sitharaman replaced the Swadeshi 'bahi khata' and switched to a tablet.
For the first time ever, the Budget will be paperless this year due to COVID-19.
It will be available for all as a soft copy, online.
The Budget speech began at around 11 AM today with Sitharaman beginning it with an address to the speaker of Lok Sabha.
Usually, the duration of the presentation ranges from 90 to 120 minutes.
Sitharaman tabled the Economic Survey in the Parliament on Friday.
The Indian economy can contract by 7.7% in the current financial year ending on March 31 and the growth could be 11% in the next financial year, according to the survey.
The contraction in FY21 is mainly due to the coronavirus pandemic and the visible damage caused by the subsequent countrywide lockdown to contain it.
The survey unveiled two days before the Union Budget is broadly in line with forecasts by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) which has said it expected the country's GDP to contract by 7.5 per cent in the year ending March 31.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently pegged the contraction in India's economy at 8 per cent in 2020-21. It expects a growth rate of 11.5% in 2021-22 before a decline to 6.8% in 2022-23 and that India will regain the tag of the fastest-growing large economy in the world in both years.
In the quarter ended June 2020, the GDP contracted by 23.9% followed by a milder contraction of 7.5% in the quarter ended September 2020.
