‘Budget? What have I got to do with it?’

Sunita Nishadh remembers how she had to travel from Haryana to her native Maharajganj in Uttar Pradesh all on her own during the covid-19 pandemic.

She was one of the lakhs of migrant workers who had to go through this upheaval upon the sudden announcement of the national lockdown. So it’s not surprising to see her uninterested in any new government schemes, announced under the Union Budget or elsewhere.

“You’re asking me about the budget,” she asks this reporter. “Instead, ask the government why it didn’t have enough money to send us back home during the corona [covid-19 pandemic].”

These days, the 35-year-old is back at work in Haryana sorting plastic waste in Rohtak’s Ladhot village. “Majboor hun [I’m helpless]. That’s why I had to return here.”

Puncturing discarded perfume cans for recycling, she adds “Mere paas bada mobile nahin hai, chhota mobile hai [I don’t have a big mobile phone, but a smaller one]. How would I know what the budget is?” With growing digitalisation, quick access to government schemes is heavily dependent on having a smartphone and an internet connection. But many in rural India still lack access to these.

In the neighbouring village of Bhaiyan Pur, buffalo herder Kaushalya Devi, 45, is similarly indifferent to the Union Budget.

“Budget? Usse kya lena-dena? [What have I got to do with it?] I am just a woman making dung cakes and keeping buffaloes. Jai Ramji ki!” she says, ending our conversation.

Kaushalya Devi’s concern instead is the low government purchase prices, especially those for milk. Lifting one of the two heavy containers she uses to collect buffalo dung, she cracks a joke, “I’d lift both of them, just give me a good price for milk.”

“If the government doesn’t even value milk,” she adds, “How would its other schemes value us?"