Ahead of India’s finances on February 1st, Narendra Modi requested Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth, to bless the poor and the center class. The prime minister’s request for divine intervention mingled public spirit with political self-interest: frustration about financial progress and joblessness contributed to Mr Modi’s lack of his outright majority in elections held final yr. Because it turned out, the center class, slightly than the poor, ended up the true winners of the fiscal assertion. Nirmala Sitharaman, Mr Modi’s finance minister, introduced tax cuts that have been value round 1trn rupees yearly ($12bn, or 0.3% of GDP), which was sufficient to exempt hundreds of thousands of comparatively high-earning Indians from earnings tax altogether.
