What if the Budget were used to announce serious policy, rather than futile programmes?

Policy to redesign education to create knowledge, rather than train people in transient skills, policy to build the new towns India needs, policy to create a functional debt market...

Variation in Budget Minor

Instead of adding to the alphabet soup of government programmes, suppose the FM had used her budget speech to announce policy initiatives to address the challenges India confronts. What could she have said?

Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) tracks 64 critical technologies in nine clusters ranging from AI, advanced information & communications, advanced materials & manufacturing, biotech, vaccines, defence and space, to robotics and quantum. Its technology tracker quantifies the contributions of different nations to the development of these technologies, which together make for strategic domination. It concludes that, as of 2023, China was ahead of the US in 57 of the 64 technologies .

In other words, DeepSeek is no flash in the pan. It is gold spun out of the scholarship systematically nurtured from basic schooling through advanced research degrees. Not one member of the DeepSeek team has studied outside China.

India treasures strategic autonomy. For this, it is not enough to buy or even locally produce advanced weapons, and practise nifty foreign policy. It calls for competence in every critical tech and bleeding edge in quite a few.

India has the world’s largest population, and the world’s largest youth population. Our schools and colleges teach them to memorise stuff and cherish degrees, rather than value, pursue and create knowledge. The notion that the Vedas contain all the knowledge does serious harm. It conditions people to think knowledge is finite, and to be mastered, rather than created, extended, discredited, dumped and replaced with superior knowled ge in a never-ending pursuit, which generates new insights, new technologies and new capabilities.

Some schools and colleges produce Abhijit Banerjees and Venki Ramakrishnans, as well as Satya Nadellas and Sundar Pichais. But most produce children only a quarter of whom can read at their level, or add or multiply. Division, of course, is something that politics takes care of later on.

The FM could announce incentives for states to kill the present system of schooling that does not educate, and replace it with a mastery model for elementary classes. No student should advance a grade without learning 100%, not 40%, of what she is supposed to learn at her level. This would ensure that a child won’t struggle with multiplica tion before mastering addition. Or grapple with sine theta before understanding division or right angles.

Learning would become thorough, and children would learn that, if they apply themselves to something long and hard enough, they can master anything. That they are inferior to none.

Children who master the fundamentals and learn to learn will acquire skills as and when needed. The FM could incentivise cooperative federalism to set up advanced centres that develop every critical technology. Colleges and universities must focus on advancing knowledge, not imparting skills, a task best accomplished outside the university system.

The FM announced a corpus of ₹1 lakh cr for R&D in her last budget. Use the corpus to set up Indian Capability Centres (ICCs) that can undertake research for companies that identify critical problems and partfund the research. Let some of Indian talent slaving away to develop IP for MNCs in GCCs work in these ICCs.

Instead of using tax giveaways to divert attention from the budget’s failure to address stalled growth, use them to incentivise retirement-savers to allocate a portion, say, 5%, of their corpus to venture-funding startups that put critical technologies to work. Such startups could fund some research in ICCs.

Instead of asking the states to put up 75% of urban projects to draw on a challenge fund, the FM could design policy for PPP to build, say, new towns that collectively span 1,000 sq km, to start with.

The world is 50% urban. China is where it is today because it is 66% urban. India has to urbanise, to grow fast and rich. If half of India’s projected population in 2040 (150-160 cr) is to be urban, the population living in towns has to rise by 25-30 cr from the present level.

These additional hordes cannot crowd into existing towns without making them dysfunctional. India needs lots of new towns. At Delhi’s population density, that would mean some 15,000 sq km of additional urban space.

Ask states to do the zoning, planning and laying out of infrastructure, besides connectivity to existing towns, for the new towns, and guarantee return of up to 15% of land that farmers release for building new towns as urban property. Let private developers build office blocks, nearby homes, schools, hospitals, entertainment hubs. Larger towns should come with a university and an airport attached, to nourish them with ideas, talent and connectivity.

Let capital come from real estate investment trusts that could absorb global capital, apart from domestic savings currently pushing up stock valuations to unrealistic multiples of earnings. Let India’s urbanisation story play out, driven essentially by private investment, with government investing in planning, zoning, contracting and funding universities, airports and connectivity to new towns.

Kalidasa once compared his poetic efforts to a dwarf reaching for luscious fruit on elevated branches. Let the Indian corporate chieftains who refuse to lift their eyes above the low branches strut around as Grumpy, Happy, Bashful, Dopey, Doc, Sneezy and Sleepy. Let policy create giants out of startups, including from the public sector.