Vishwanath Pratap Singh: The Balance-Sheet Arun Ghosh THE Finance Minister of India can always be expected to make a strong impact on the economy. After all, he is the principal architect of economic policy in the country. Through the budget, he affects the lives and living conditions of the people; and no matter what the planners prognosticate, it is he who finally determines the priorities by allocating funds as between government consumption expenditure and government investment as also the outlay on competing projects and programmes, on an annual basis. And though he fashions neither trade policy nor industrial policy directly, he has an important say in the actual working of these policies, for he has the final say on import and excise duties, on subsidies paid out from the Central exchequer, and on the pricing of the products (and services) of monopoly undertakings of the government.
