The budget is designed to serve the narrow industrial interests even as it further destroys urban quality of life leading to enormous traffic mayhem and a threat to the lives of hundreds of thousands of urban Indians.

CSE studies have shown that the pollution grows very rapidly with the increase in vehicles. Between 1975 and 1995, India’s GDP grew about 2.5 times but its vehicular pollution load grew by almost eight times. But the Finance Minister has ignored death and disease to give sops to the auto industry without ensuring environmental protection.

The very idea of taxing CNG at a time when the Supreme Court is making a brave attempt to ensure that CNG is used in commercial vehicles in Delhi in order to clean up its air, almost amounts to a contempt of the Supreme Court by the political leaders of the Natioal Democratic Alliance (NDA) government. Delhi today leads the country in creating a market for CNG driven vehicles. According to CSE’s estimates, the total revenue Mr Sinha will be able to net from Delhi by the levy of taxation on CNG amounts to just less than about Rs.3 crore. This money could have been easily raised by taxation of diesel which would have sent a clear signal that public health is of importance to the NDA government. The amount of money that the Finance Minister intends to collect through the tax proposed on CNG could have been obtained from an infinitesimally small levy of tax on diesel. A Rs. 2 per litre tax on diesel would have netted the Finance Minister some Rs. 9,000 crore.

The tax rebate that has been given to all private vehicles like scooters and cars is even more reprehensible especially given the state of traffic in most Indian cities. If indeed private vehicles have to be promoted by the NDA government, the same tax rebate could have been given to vehicles which have much more stringent emission standards than even EURO II. This would have forced the automobile industry to produce much more environment-friendly vehicles. From Indian makers of Maruti to Indica and foreign manufacturers like Hyundai, Daewoo, Ford, GM and Mercedes Benz, all of them are now producing Euro III cars for the European market but none of them will introduce them into the Indian market even though India has far more serious air pollution problems than the Europe. This is because these vehicles would be more expensive and, therefore, they would not introduce them in the price-sensitive market of India. But a tax rebate of this kind on vehicles which have better emissions would have pushed manufacturers either to improve their engines to reduce emissions or introduce better fuel like CNG or LPG. Yashwant Sinha has wasted an excellent opportunity to push manufacturers towards cleaner air. Sinha has shown not only contempt for the lives of Indian people but also for the efforts of the Supreme Court.

Equally, the near total neglect of the rural sector means that Yashwant Sinha’s budget has failed to provide programmes and schemes that will help to create more rural livelihoods. In the absence of serious efforts to create rural livelihoods, more and more people from villages will stream into Indian cities in the years to come, making it impossible to manage Indian cities. Even in the R & D sector most of the increases in budgets had been given to institutions like the Departments of Atomic Energy and Space which have nothing to do with the creation of rural livelihoods. As Mr Agarwal puts it, "The budget presents vision of a government. But this budget presents an absolutely retrogressive and disastrous vision for the future of this country".