Dalal Street Investment Journal

Mr Jaitley,You Deserve 9 Out Of 10

As we gear up to embrace the month of March, crucial from the point of view of Indian economy, I take this opportunity to express myself reacting on the union budget just tabled by our finance minister, Arun Jaitley—the best union budget I managed to explore in last 12 years or so. One budget to cover dozens of sectors, industries and billions of faces across the country. A tight-rope walk he had to do, our finance minister and I will give him a rating of 9 out of 10. While his budget document focussed on agriculture and rural development, it also in a subtle manner brought in infrastructure, irrigation, education, skill development and many other sectors under its scope.

While Jaitley ensured the corporates in India cheer the budget, he also brought in smiles on the faces of crores of Indians living in rural India. How I wish, the budget, third such tabled by him, would have even taken care of the interests of the marginal farmers who hardly have an acre or two of ploughing land. Had they been covered by this budget, I would not have hesitated to give this budget 10 out of 10. But then, I already told you about the tight-rope walk that he had to do. Also I must mention here, this budget has been prepared under able guidance of our Prime Minister and I am sure, his valid inputs had been passed on to the finance minister and his team which worked hard to finally shape up the final budget document. The vision of Prime Minister reflects well on the leap year budget. Markets, hence, have started reacting to it positively. While I write this piece for you, I note Sensex climbed over 450 points on March 2, a day after it clocked a rise of 777 points, highest ever in last 7 years. I feel confident in saying, the upward trend has just begun and it may continue for some time. So invest wisely to get higher returns. We are as always there, to guide you and come up with suggestions during these crucial days of taking right investment decisions.

The budget while allocating Rs two lakh crores for the infrastructure sector, it also talked about strengthening the housing sector. Indeed, a follow-up action by Narendra Modi’s team since he took charge of the country two years back and it is simply nice to note that promises are slowly but steadily being implemented. This is possible only when the captain of the ship himself works hard and leads from the front, true to the spirit of our Prime Minister. In our Capital Column in this issue, we have talked about Narendra Modi and his core team, most of the members of this team manage to sleep hardly four hours in a day while dedicating rest of the time to work towards interest of the nation.

We have roped in 20 experts from as many sectors in this issue letting them speak on the impact of the union budget on each of these sectors and how the budget is going to affect stocks of various companies covered under these sectors. An exhaustive work has been done by our team to bring out the best to our reader-investors yet again. Our research team has burnt mid-night oil to analyse hundreds of companies’ third quarter results from eight different sectors and brought out a detail analysis which, I believe, will guide our reader-investors during their course of journey when it comes to taking wise investment decisions.

I am sure, you will love going through this issue as well, rich in content, opinions, analysis, debates, discussions, talks and facts. Write back to me whenever you can. It is always a pleasure to read your mails and realise we have been still serving you faithfully, 30 years since we had begun our journey.