Defence received the highest allocation as Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman continued to focus on infrastructure, local manufacturing and fiscal consolidation in the 2024 interim budget.
The outlay for the Defence Ministry is budgeted at Rs 6.2 lakh crore for FY25 as compared with Rs 5.94 lakh crore in the ongoing fiscal, according to budget documents. Road transport and railways remain among the top three ministries by allocation in the budget.
Among the government's key schemes, the rural jobs guarantee programme or MGNREGA got the highest allocation of Rs 86,000 crore, up from Rs 60,000 crore budgeted in FY24.
Allocation to production-linked incentives, solar power grid and chip manufacturing support also rose significantly.
In her speech, the Finance Minister pegged the FY25 target at 5.1% of the GDP, while revising the estimate for FY24 to 5.8% as compared with the budget estimate of 5.9%.
The outlay for infrastructure rose 17% to Rs 11.11 lakh crore, or 3.4% of GDP, over the revised estimate of Rs 9.5 lakh crore in FY24.
She also announced a Rs 1-lakh-crore corpus to back innovation. This includes 50-year interest-free loan, long-term financing or refinancing with long tenures with low or nil interest rates. The move is aimed at encouraging the private sector to scale up research and innovations "significantly in sunrise domains", Sitharaman said.
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