India's Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and her team are getting ready to present the highly-anticipated budget for the 2020-21 fiscal year later on Saturday.
Outside the finance ministry, the entire budget-building team, including Minister of State for Finance Anurag Thakur, was seen with Sitharaman.
This time too, Sitharaman has ditched a leather briefcase and opted for a traditional, hand-made red ledger with the national emblem on it to hold budget documents.
It is expected that the new budget will offer income tax incentives and allocate more funds to increase state spending on infrastructure in an attempt to revive economic growth, which hit a decade-low last year.
In an economic survey presented on Friday, it was predicted that the country's economic growth would increase from between 6.0-6.5 percent.
Meanwhile, Twitter is abuzz with politicians and business tycoons sharing their expectations from the budget, with some projecting it as a measure that will provide a “healing touch” to the general public and improve the state of the economy.
The challenges that the finance minister is currently facing are falling revenues, low investment, and lacklustre growth.
The International Monetary Fund had previoulsy lowered India’s growth projection to 4.8 percent from 6.1 percent for the current financial year (April 2019-March 2020).