Ajay S. Mittal Reaction on Budget 2012

“Like the Rail budget today’s union budget is also quite disappointing in terms of laying a clear plan for addressing key priorities for our economy. With a more focus towards populist policies it has not addressed key issues such as tackling one of the most important aspect of our economy ‘logistics cost’ which is around 14% of our GDP. As per the honourable minister the GDP growth expected in coming year is 7.6%, but he has not identified how this growth will be managed in our existing logistics infrastructure bottleneck especially in roads and rail. Although recognising the need of PPPs in country’s infrastructure development, no roadmap was discussed to broaden the scope of the existing policy to include crucial logistics infrastructure such as ‘Warehousing’ being allocated the much needed ‘Infrastructure Status’.