HAPPILY for its members India’s Parliament convenes for just three sessions a year, for an undemanding 100 days in all. In early spring the finance minister traditionally launches a session devoted to the budget. Arun Jaitley, the current minister, tossed spring flowers aplenty from his saffron-coloured briefcase on February 29th. There were promises to double farm incomes within five years, to raise wages for state employees and to spark new investment, all in a “pro-poor yet pro-market” bouquet of fiscal responsibility.

Mr Jaitley is lucky to have an economic tailwind. Lower global oil prices have helped India. Its companies are vibrant. A growing domestic economy with huge potential makes some of the broader concerns about the world economy such as a slowdown in China and among Western consumers less relevant to India. Still, some of Mr Jaitley’s budget promises look less rosy now, after being roughly handled by India’s opposition and press.

An apparent big boost for crop insurance turns out to have been accomplished largely by shunting funds between ministries, from finance to agriculture. Additional outlays for a rural-jobs scheme for the poor may be welcome, yet before he came to power nearly two years ago, the prime minister, Narendra Modi, condemned the same programme as a monument to failure. Some analysts contend that Mr Jaitley’s claim of robust economic growth of 7.6% is based on flawed statistical modelling. And others say that Mr Modi agreed to stick with a budget deficit of 3.5%, which is restrained by Indian standards, in order to save up for a bigger splash next year, when the more crucial state elections loom.

In a democracy as sprawling and vibrant as India’s, sniping about such things is to be expected. So is a vigorous government response. Jayant Sinha, the junior minister for finance, is impatient with critics. He admits that many of the changes brought about by his government are small or not yet fully articulated. But such initiatives as a programme to open bank accounts for every household (which has already added some 212m accounts); or a hydrocarbons-exploration law that could promote a surge in investment to wean India off costly energy imports; or new bankruptcy rules that will make it easier for failed companies to be closed down; or a broad, yet-to-be-unveiled health insurance scheme aimed at the poor: all promise big returns. Taken together, he insists, such policies are transformational.

That is overstating it but at least Mr Jaitley’s budget will pass. The ruling coalition has a comfortable majority in the Lok Sabha, Parliament’s lower house, and India’s constitution insulates “money bills” from meddling by the Rajya Sabha or upper house, dominated by the opposition.

Meanwhile, the main reason Mr Modi’s government deserves credit, says one economist, is not any vision or drive but simply for appearing far less corrupt than its Congress-led predecessor, and for being reassuringly stolid at a time of deep global uncertainty. The government may be its own worst enemy, say other backers of its liberalising economic agenda, by injecting too much jumlebaazi—“word play” or “catchphrase” in Hindi, ie, hype—into the debate, thereby raising unrealistic expectations of land and labour reform and much more.

A continent masquerading as a country: Explore India in our interactive map On the airwaves, on posters and in government-sponsored print adverts, such promotions as Make In India, and Start Up India Stand Up India, with Mr Modi’s picture always prominent, have made a big splash. Yet when the prime minister declared at a recent IMF-sponsored event in Delhi, the capital, that India had opened “all sectors” to foreign investment, or that it had reached “the highest rank” in last year’s ease-of-doing-business index compiled by the World Bank, participants politely scratched their heads. India has opened more fields to foreign capital, including recently allowing wholly foreign-owned companies into food-processing industries. But it has generally done so in a piecemeal and often grudging fashion. As for the ease of doing business, a closer look at the index reveals that although India has moved up four places in the 2016 list, it still ranks only 130th out of 189 economies. A tangled bureaucracy, knotty laws and ponderous courts mean that while India ranks eighth in protecting minority shareholders, it trails in 178th place for enforcing contracts and in 183rd place for securing construction permits. The “licence raj” that began to be dismantled 25 years ago remains only half-demolished. Public-sector banks, burdened with a huge stock of bad loans to stalled infrastructure projects and ailing heavy industries, still make up seven-tenths of the banking system. The finance ministry, charged with privatising state assets, dares not touch such chronic loss-makers as Air India, which employs 28,000 voters. Yet no amount of government tinkering or talking up is going to turn the Indian elephant into a tiger any time soon. With the central government collecting the equivalent of just 11% of GDP in taxes, it lacks transformational capacity. A commendable, long-term devolution of power from the centre to individual states means that these now spend some 1.7 times what the national government does. Some states have used this growing clout effectively. Others lag far behind, giving India huge discrepancies in economic performance between regions and states (see chart).

Transformational capacity would surely be boosted by a long-planned goods and services tax. It would improve government revenues and market efficiency by unifying a patchwork of sales and other taxes. Yet politics is stymying its introduction. Mr Modi blames the opposition’s obstructionism in Parliament, but his own party behaved just the same way before it came to power. Critics say that it should now be readier for political horse-trading. Its hot-headed Hindu-nationalist supporters, meanwhile, keep handing ammunition to the opposition, allowing it to change the subject from everyday economic issues to emotive questions of sectarianism or human rights.

Raghu accentuates the positive

Yet calmer voices are occasionally heard. Raghuram Rajan, who heads India’s central bank and is an advocate of prudent national finances, remains upbeat. “All too often our public debates generate more noise than illumination,” he says. He also warns of the danger of fixation on slow progress with certain reforms, such as privatisation, even as the overall trend remains positive. When the world’s financial markets are in turmoil, India’s strong growth prospects are something to be thankful for. “We are in a sweet spot,” he says. “Let’s not waste the opportunity.”