A balanced and a pragmatic budget. It had all the ingredients to push growth and bring reforms back on track. The push on infrastructure, social security schemes and a commitment towards implementation of GST by next year are the notable positives. The finance minister has provided a direction to the development model of the government in the budget by embedding a lot of growth multipliers, such as the thrust on public investment, which would certainly result in rejuvenating the investment cycle in the economy.
For the metallurgical coke industry, the increase in customs duty on met coke to 5% is a step in the right direction and can be considered to be overall positive, though we had expected something more. It certainly differentiates between the duty of raw material and that for the value addition that is done by the domestic met coke manufacturing industry and rectifies the anomaly that was introduced in the last budget when both the duties were made same.