KC Venugopal criticized Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s reply to the budget discussion in Lok Sabha

New Delhi: Congress MP KC Venugopal accused Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman of sidestepping important topics in her response to the Lok Sabha’s budget debate. He said in his X post that Sitharaman‘s response was more about gaining political points than it was about resolving the opposition’s concerns.

“The finance minister’s response to the Lok Sabha’s budget debate was a master lesson in assigning blame, evading, and diverting attention from the facts. Her haughty rejection of the urgent concerns brought up by the opposition demonstrates that her true goal was to make political points rather than address the budget’s shortcomings, Venugopal wrote on X.

He said that Sitharaman’s choice to focus only on data from the UPA period has been especially controversial since it ignores the nation’s present economic problems.

He said in the article, “In her response, she felt it would be more appropriate to highlight figures from the UPA period rather than elucidating the reasons for the terminal decrease of important economic indicators, such as the GDP growth rate or the value of the rupee relative to the dollar. She blamed state governments for the stagnation or decline in budget allocations for important social welfare programs.

Venugopal voiced dissatisfaction, saying that the administration has been involved in political infighting since 2014, leaving the Indian people without solutions, rather than tackling the economic issue.

Sitharaman refuted accusations from the opposition in Parliament on Tuesday, stating that capital budget expenditures had not decreased.

According to her, the government is funding efficient capital expenditures with almost all of the borrowed funds.

In response to a lengthy discussion on the 2025–26 budget in the Lok Sabha, the minister said that effective capital expenditure is expected to be 15.48 lakh crore, compared to 13.18 lakh crore in the updated 2024–25 estimates.

She said that, in contrast to the fiscal deficit objective of 4.4% of GDP, the effective capital expenditure for 2025–2026 is 4.3% of GDP.

Long-term physical or permanent assets are established by capital expenditure, or capex.

Core capital expenditures and grants to governments for the development of capital assets are both considered forms of effective capital expenditure. “They go for creating capital assets in the states, even though the grants in aid for capital asset creation are accounted for in the budget as revenue expenditure,” she added.