This year’s budget write-off in customs duty on gold, diamonds and jewellery (all aam aadmi items, of course) is Rs 75,592 crore. That’s well over twice the “record” amount allocated to the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. As Prof Jayati Ghosh points out, the MNREGA has given billions of person-days of work to tens of millions of poor rural households this past decade. It has been allocated Rs 34,699 crore. (You can find the gold figure in the Union Budget 2015-16. Just go to the annexure marked Statement of Revenue Foregone; http://indiabudget.nic.in/ub2015-16/statrevfor/annex12.pdf.) This giveaway on gold and precious stones in fact accounts for fully a fourth of all customs duty exemptions. Overall, the budget for agriculture has fallen by more than Rs 5,000 crore compared to last year. The concessions on customs duty on gold, however, have gone up by more than five times that amount in the past 12 months.

Meanwhile, the...