In this book, a look at Jaswant Singh’s short tenure as finance minister and the budget he presented

Jaswant Singh presented his first and only Budget for 2003–04. The economic backdrop was not too inspiring, though there were signs of an economic turnaround. The growth in India’s GDP would be 3.8 per cent for the full year of 2002–03. Exports would grow by over 20 per cent to $52.72 billion. And wholesale inflation would be modest at 3.4 per cent. The external sector would remain robust. The current account balance, which had turned surplus in 2001–02 at 0.7 per cent of GDP, after a gap of twenty-three years, had become even more stable at 1.2 per cent of GDP in 2002–03. The import cover (the number of months whose imports could be financed through the available foreign exchange reserves) had gone up from 11.5 months in 2001–02 to 14.2 months in 2002–03. This was because India’s foreign exchange reserves had jumped from $54 billion at the end of March 2002 to $76 billion a year later.

Not surprisingly, in early February, Singh advised the government to prepay the country’s external loans. The government, therefore, decided to prepay $3 billion of its external loans. In many other ways, India was doing better than in the past few years. It was...

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