UPDATED: January 17, 2021 17:29 IST
In the hot seat: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman at
a press conference in November 2020 (Photo: Getty Images)
When Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presents Budget 2021 on February 1, the circumstances that she will do so in will be, without doubt, exceptional. The Covid-19 lockdown last year was an economic earthquake of sorts, comparable to the global financial crisis sparked off by the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. D.K. Joshi, chief economist at Crisil, says, "No other budget compares as closely to the upcoming one as the one that followed the Lehman Brothers crisis." Thanks to the fiscal stimuli rolled out in 2008-09, India emerged rather unscathed from that crisis, though the splurge seeded other problems, including a spate of corporate bankruptcies and mounting bad loans in the following years.