Modi Govt May Present First Full Budget of 2nd Tenure by July 10: Report

The Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government is likely to present the first full budget for 2019-20 around July 10.

“No date has been finalized yet. There is still time. It will be decided after the swearing-in ceremony and once a minister takes charge. But it will be around July 10 in all probability," a senior government official was quoted as saying by Moneycontrol.

Usually the budget exercise gets over by July 15 and this year too it's likely to be the same, the official said.

"The budget meetings have already begun. So a date will also be finalized soon," the official said.

The BJP government had presented its Interim budget in February, before the Lok Sabha elections. The then stand in Finance minister Piyush Goyal had announced a relief package of Rs 75,000 crore under a new scheme PM Kisaan Samman Nidhi for distressed farmers.

Farm sector slowdown snowballed into a big political issue ahead of the Lok Sabha elections in April-May. Prices fell sharply in many commodities, pummeled by a production glut, forcing many farmers to dump their produce at extremely low prices that hardly covers for their cost.

"The budget will definitely have an agrarian focus, because that was an election issue and now the government has to deliver on it to tackle the slowdown in rural consumption," the official said.

The incumbent BJP was fighting for a second term in 2019 and romped home with landslide victory, with the BJP winning 303 seats and decimating the main opposition party, the Indian National Congress, to a 52 seats.

Goyal had also proposed an increase in the amount of standard deduction for salaried individuals. In his Budget speech, the interim finance minister proposed to increase the amount of standard deduction by Rs 10,000 to Rs 50,000 from Rs 40,000 earlier.