It has been a custom that the finance minister addresses the RBI board, consisting of RBI Governor and existing four deputy governors, after the budget.
The meeting has been scheduled for February 14 where she would be addressing the board members and talk about announcements made in the Budget to perk up growth hit by three waves of COVID-19, sources said.
The government expects this growth to be fuelled by a massive capital spending programme outlined in the Budget with a view to crowd-in private investment by reinvigorating economic activities and creating
The finance minister raised capital expenditure (capex) by 35.4 percent for the financial year 2022-23 to Rs 7.5 lakh crore to continue the public investment-led recovery of the pandemic-battered economy. The capex this year is pegged at Rs 5.5 lakh crore.
The spending on building multimodal logistics parks, metro systems, highways, and trains is expected to create demand for the private sector as all the projects are to be implemented through contractors.
With regard to borrowing, the government plans to borrow a record Rs 11.6 lakh crore from the market in 2022-23 to meet its expenditure requirement to prop up the economy.
This is nearly Rs 2 lakh crore higher than the current year’s Budget estimate of Rs 9.7 lakh crore.
Even the gross borrowing for the next financial year will be the highest-ever at Rs 14,95,000 crore as against Rs 12,05,500 crore Budget Estimate (BE) for 2021-22.
Fiscal deficit — the excess of government expenditure over its revenues — is estimated to come down to 6.4 percent of GDP next year as against 6.9 percent pegged for the current fiscal ending March 31.
The Reserve Bank is likely to maintain the status quo on the key policy rate in its next bi-monthly monetary policy to be announced on Thursday in view of elevated level of inflation.
Experts, however, are of the opinion that RBI’s monetary policy committee (MPC) may change the policy stance from 'accommodative' to 'neutral' and tinker with the reverse-repo rate as part of the liquidity normalisation process.
The MPC has been mandated by the government to keep the inflation in the range of 2-6 percent.