Mr Asim Dasgupta, West Bengal?s finance minister, has brought the curtain down on the stale fan dance called a zero-deficit budget. A budget with a deficit fooled no one and only proved that Mr Dasgupta was rather good at juggling with statistics. He has, in the budget for 2005-06, announced that there will be a deficit of Rs 5 crore. The overall budget deficit was estimated at Rs 105 crore but Mr Dasgupta hopes to mobilize resources of Rs 100 crore to keep the deficit at the Rs 5 crore level. The Rs 100 crore extra revenue the finance minister hopes to raise through tinkering with the excise rates on Indian made foreign liquor. Mr Dasgupta may well find at the end of the fiscal year that his calculations for collecting the extra revenue through instruments like the sales tax erred on the side of optimism. On the expenditure side, there is the promise that non-plan expenditure will be restricted. This may not be a false promise since the finance minister has registered some success in reducing the gap between revenue and expenditure. On the other hand, Mr Dasgupta has raised plan expenditure by a whopping 68 per cent from Rs 4,184 crore to Rs 7,051 crore. This, as the minister has claimed, is a record of sorts for West Bengal. This money is to come, according to Mr Dasgupta, from the 12th finance commission which will fetch Rs 2,800 crore. Mr Dasgupta has taken advantage of this timely boon.

The moot question is what impact this expenditure will have on long-term economic development of the state. There is always the danger, given the propensities of the Left Front, that much of the expenditure will be to finance populist schemes. There is some indication in the budget that this might happen. Subsidies will proliferate in different guises, especially as assembly elections are due next year. Mr Dasgupta?s pet slogan is decentralization and he allocated more funds under this head. It will not be unfair, given the track record of the Left Front, to see in this a political ploy. Funds for the grand scheme of decentralization are often used by the left to oil their own election machinery. Mr Dasgupta?s budget thus has two planks. It takes advantage of the money coming from the finance commission; and it looks ahead at the elections. Can Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee?s vision of a new and resurgent West Bengal be served by such a budget? The chief minister?s new wine cannot be put into Mr Dasgupta?s old bottle.