I am a firm believer that great citizens build a great country. I believe that the government needs to trust people, invest in them, and when someone cheats or breaks the system, give harsh punishments to set an example.I also believe that people know the best, that crowdsourcing can bring out the best of the ideas. There may be few brilliant people, but sometimes even the dumbest ones gives excellent perspective.So, here we have a budget, rather a plan of expenditure and raising of money, which was created after due consultations of the people of Delhi. I don't have the exact number of the public meetings that were conducted, but I believe about 11-13 constituencies were involved in this. Also, there were consultations with the industry. The ideas absorbed, filtered and finally this budget was created. Hence it is also called as Swaraj Budget.My opinion doesn't really matter much after both the industry and Nobel laureate Kailash Satyarthi has given it a thumbs up - Kailash Satyarthi on Twitter and CII welcomes u2018comprehensiveu2024 Delhi Budget, but would like to give my 2 cents here.People are not a liability, they are an asset. It only depends upon how the government treats them. India has a large population, majorly because we ourselves wanted cheap labour to work in our own farms. This was true at least in my state UP. However, later the large population started to become a liability as the returns were much lesser than the food it required. The mistake that India made was it didn't invest much in education and quality education. None of Indian institutes are counted among the best in the world. The condition of primary school has been pathetic, with perhaps only Central Schools to an exception. State and municipality run schools are a strict no-no even for the lower middle class.Same has been the case with the state of health in India. There are hardly any good state/municipality run hospitals around. A family friend of mine was given a waiting list of 2 months for an urgent operation of his.Due to these above factors, politicians backs schools and hospitals took over the Health and Education sector. And then the politicians ensured that the government backed schools and hospitals remain in a pathetic state, so that their own profits remain high.AAP is breaking that. 106% hike in education budget, 20,000 new teachers, 50 model schools, 1000 new neighbourhood clinics, increase in bed count in hospitals by 10,000, online reservation of beds, 310 crore for skill development and professional education, government backed loan of Rs 10 Lakh with discount of 1% to girl students, CCTV cameras in government schools, free WiFi in colleges are the way to achieve high quality government backed health and education. If the people are educated and healthy, Delhi would have better human resources to build a better city in a long run.Another important factor for a better life is cleanliness and hygiene. The MCD has been running deficient of funds due to tax collections issues and due to corruption plaguing it. A good 5908 Crore has been kept for the municipalities, however I am afraid AAP just might be feeding a black hole. Good thing is that there is now plan for 15 new sewer plants, which would reduce the garbage being dumped into the River Yamuna.Women are almost the 50% of the Delhi population, however the city has been very unsafe for the them. Deploying home guards in the DTC buses along with CCTV cameras is a welcome step. New Women hostels are coming up as well.An awesome step, one which I always wanted, is the introduction of Pay and Play to the government stadium. These stadiums were like white elephants - Huge, expensive to build, expensive to maintain, and of no use to common man. Now, when people would use them and pay to use them, their maintenance would be more streamlined.There were no hike in the taxes and no new taxes were introduced. Perhaps there was no need as the tax collection has gone up by an impressive 37%. However the entry tax for trucks (polluting vehicles?) has been increased which would have an effect on the inflation in the city. The Tourism department would be headed by someone from the corporate sector, and this means Delhi might just become a Tourism hub. Although it already is, but not when it comes to International standards, where its tourism economy cannot be compared to that of Rome or London. In fact the money generated by Tourism in Rome is higher than that of the whole India.The hike in entertainment and luxury tax is like a poke to the affluent class. I don't think that is going to increase the tax revenue much, rather it would discourage the affluent class in spending in luxury.A very good initiative and important experiment is the allocation of money as a Swaraj Fund for the local populace. This fund of Rs 253 Crore is being allocated for the 11 constituencies (where the public meetings prior to the budget were held), and it would be spent as per the local consensus.The experiment might be a success, or might just fail, however the results might just decide the direction of democracy in India in the future.Overall, it is a very good budget which would increase the quality of life of the common man struggling daily. With better schools, the private schools won't be able to hike the fees as per their whims, with better government hospitals and neighbourhood clinics, the dependance on the private hospitals would go down, and would reduce the health expenditure by the common man.
