United we stand: Team UPA's first budget has the Common Minimum Programme's writ large on it

See the worthies in the picture above (that, in turn, has seen some use)? They are members of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) that runs the government, or representatives of parties supporting it from the outside; the turbaned individual near the left corner, Comrade Harkishen Singh Surjeet of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), is one such. The slim unimpressive looking document the people in the photograph hold in their hands is the Common Minimum Programme (CMP), a sort of vision statement for governance created after taking into account the ideologies of the 15 parties that constitute the UPA. At the time, most economic analysts believed that the CMP would cramp Finance Minister P. Chidambaram's reformist-style, although the man himself claimed that it gave him enough leeway to do what was required.

It turns out that he was right. The influence of the CMP, now called the National Common Minimum Programme or NCMP, is evident in Budget 2004. ''(It is), fully faithful to the NCMP,'' is how Chidambaram himself has described the Budget. And why wouldn't it be? He referred to the NCMP only around 20 times in his 110-minute speech.

That is not to mean the FM let himself be constrained by the letter of the NCMP. In a couple of instances, he has adhered to the spirit, but stretched the letter a bit, often at the risk of annoying the communist parties that support the government. Thus, he has gone ahead and relaxed the ceiling on foreign direct investment in telecom (49 per cent to 74 per cent), insurance (26 per cent to 49 per cent), and civil aviation (40 per cent to 49 per cent). And he has gone ahead and announced that the government will piggyback on NTPC's initial public offering, and divest its stake (without altering the essentially public sector character of the companies in question) in some companies to raise around Rs 4,000 crore that will go into developmental projects.

The sting of these measures-if at all it is that-has been counter weighed by several others that reflect the direction set forth in the NCMP. For instance, Chidambaram announced the creation of a National Manufacturing Competitiveness Council, the introduction of a National Employment Guarantee Act, a 2 per cent education cess, and a Food For Work programme. And, in consonance with the NCMP, the focus of Budget 2004 is on agriculture and the rural economy. However, given economic realities, and Chidambaram's proven status as a reformer, it is likely the larger direction of the Budget would have remained the same even had the NCMP not touched upon agriculture. Of course, the smaller things, such as the desalination plant for Chennai or the Bihar package Chidambaram announced (both find mention in the NCMP), are another issue altogether.