Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday hailed Finance Minister Arun Jaitley for presenting an all-friendly budget with a focus on agriculture, health and small businesses.
PM Modi said that this budget has devoted attention to all sectors, ranging from agriculture to infrastructure.
“This budget is farmer friendly, common citizen friendly, business environment friendly and development friendly. It will add to ease of living,” PM Modi said in his first reaction after Jaitley presented the 2018-19 Budget in the Lok Sabha.
“I congratulate the Finance Minister for the decision regarding MSP. I am sure it will help farmers tremendously,” he said, referring to Jaitley’s announcement that the Minimum Support Price for notified kharif crops will be 1.5 times the input cost. The government also stepped up the institutional credit for the sector to Rs 11 lakh crore.
On Ujjwala Yojana, a scheme initiated by Ministry of Petroleum & Natural Gas with aims to safeguard the health of women and children by providing clean cooking fuel, PM Modi said that I am pleased that while expanding the Ujjwala Yojana, its target has now been increased from 5 crore families to 8 crore.
Under the Prime Minister Gram Sadak Yojana, which a nationwide plan in India to provide good all-weather road connectivity to unconnected villages, PM Modi said there will also be work to connect villages to rural Haat, higher education centres and hospitals.
On agricultural sector Budget decisions, PM Modi said the move to develop a plan for storage, processing, marketing for agricultural products created in different districts in the country is highly commendable.
From food processing to fibre optics, roads to shipping, youth to senior citizen, rural India to Ayushmaan Bharat, Digital India to Start Up India, this budget strengthens hopes and aspirations of crores of Indians, PM Modi added.