India showed world the way forward post pandemic: FM Nirmala Sitharaman

A 'White Paper' promised by finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman can only sharpen the attack on Congress.
The FM on Thursday said that while the world faced a crisis of food, fertilizer, fuel and finances in the aftermath of the pandemic, "India successfully navigated its way. What's more, the country showed the way forward and built consensus on solutions for those global problems."
The bullish note fits in with BJP's plank of India's emergence as a global player under Modi and his vision for the leap that would turn the country into a developed country by 2047.
Indications of future schemes were both in terms of a general broad vision as well as specific promises. Among these were two crore more houses for the poor over the next five years and a scheme to help "deserving sections of the middle class" who live in rented houses, slums or chawls and unauthorised colonies to buy or build houses.
The rooftop solar power scheme would target one crore households, which could get up to 300 units free electricity every month from it, the FM said, adding that this follows the PM's resolve on the day the idol in Ayodhya's Ram Mandir was consecrated.
Among segments picked out for future programmes were "tech savvy youth". The Budget proposed a corpus of Rs 1 lakh crore to be established with a 50-year interest free loan. The corpus is to provide long-term financing or refinancing with long tenors and low or nil interest rates. Merits apart, there could not have been a better way of fusing the regime and the leader with an ambitious cohort, which has the potential to emerge as the hub for ever expanding array of innovations: from low-hanging fruit of coding to the promising frontier of AI to quantum computing.
The Budget marks yet another effort to align the country with the global push for green energy, with Sitharman laying out an impressive blueprint ecompassing e-vehicles, circular economy and green-compliant innovations of bio-plastics and bio-pharma.