00:00Economist and lecturer Indira Sajjavan is defending the mid-term budget presented by Finance Minister Devindranath Tanku, who requested an additional $3.4 billion.
00:12So for those who want to say, well, you know, why is the government coming and asking for all this additional money mid-year?
00:23The first answer to that is this is normal. It is par for the course.
00:27But more importantly, this is a new administration. This is a new administration that is only now in office a little over one month.
00:35And therefore, all of the expenditure that has already taken for this fiscal year so far, for the first five months of this fiscal year, did not fall under the remit of this particular administration.
00:45She hopes government will keep their lines of communication open with the public.
00:49It is very heartening that from the very get-go, this administration has put accountability and transparency above all else.
01:00And it is early days now and we are getting that.
01:02And it is my sincere hope that the administration continues along that line, continues communicating with the population.
01:11The Economist urges government to intensify the diversification thrust.
01:16All energies must be put in the direction of getting more gas, bringing to market more oil because we have the infrastructure to support it.
01:27And by all means, the Minister of Energy should allocate a significant part of his energies to that.
01:35And incentivizing exploration so that we can monetize oil and gas, whatever little we have.
01:45Simultaneously, he needs to allocate, in my view, more of his time and more of the time of his technocrats to reposition in our energy sector,
01:57to move it away from fossil fuel dependency into renewables.
02:01And there are easy ways, she says, that foreign exchange can be increased.
02:07If government is going to borrow, in order to identify a series of agricultural crops,
02:14that we have the capacity in this country to grow at an accelerated rate using technology, etc.,
02:21to add value and export what we are producing, then that would be great.
02:27And if you explain that to people, then people will be quite happy with that.
02:33Our food import bill is over US$1 billion.
02:36Imagine if we could start to replace that with local food substitutes.
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