At times the stock market movements are taken to be a vindication of the budget. While this is an extreme view, it cannot be ignored as the entire media is glued to the indices all through the day. Even so, it can be said that the market was virtually agnostic to the announcements by the end of the day even though there were wide gyrations in the interim period.

The NIFTY was marginally down by 30 points while the Sensex was down by 73 points. But the difference between the day’s high and low was 1500 points. Why should this be so? The budget speech started with expenditure outlays and then moved over to the tax proposals. The first part of the budget was generally positive. The focus was on employment, MSMEs, skill creation, inclusive development and so on. In particular, there was an emphasis on the housing sector.

While the proposals were not really........

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