A day before Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presents the Union Budget for the fiscal year 2022-23, 47 per cent citizens have demanded health to be the top sector for allocation on the social front in a survey by LocalCircles. While on the development front, citizens want agriculture and roads & highways to be top allocated sectors.
As India fights the third wave of COVID which began December last year led by the Omicron variant, citizens have favoured expenditure on health to be the top-most priority in the latest survey.
On being asked about what should be the top focus of Budget 2022 on the social front, 47 per cent of citizens surveyed marked health as the priority while 19 percent chose education/online education enablement. For the same question, 6 per cent wanted clean air to be the priority while another 6 percent said women and child safety should be the top focus.
“The majority of citizens in the survey said that the government should expedite a project to either build permanent or temporary Primary and Community Health Centers (PHCs and CHCs),” the report said.
People feel that it is also critical that the government puts immediate focus on funding and enabling a staffed and dedicated children’s healthcare.
On the development front, 33 per cent of the citizens surveyed have favoured agriculture to be the top focus area in the budget followed by 31 percent who chose roads & highways. While 14 per cent of respondents chose telecom and internet to be the top focus, 3 per cent said airports and 2 per cent said railways should be the top priority.
The survey also asked another question on the migration to the new tax regime. The government had introduced a new tax regime in Budget 2020 while continuing the old regime — the option to choose lies with the taxpayer. LocalCircles says that in the survey, 37 per cent of respondents said that they would migrate if the tax rate is reduced further by 2-5. While 28 percent of people said that they would not switch to the new system regardless of the tax rate.
Over 28,000 responses were received from over citizens residing in 344 districts of India. 66 percent of the participants were men while 34 percent were women. 41 percent respondents were from Tier 1, 33 percent from tier 2 and 26 percent respondents from tier 3,4 and rural districts.
The survey highlighted that citizens have high hopes that the upcoming Union Budget 2022 will lay the path for faster growth along with providing some relief to the tax-paying middle class in form of lower tax rates/incentives.
