DHAAK: India’s finance minister Arun Jaitley announced a budget for growth on Saturday, saying the economy was ready to ‘fly’ and that the government would boost investment and ordinary people should benefit.

Jaitley said economic growth would accelerate to between 8 percent and 8.5 percent in the fiscal year starting in April.

‘India is about to take off,’ Jaitley, 62, told lawmakers after rising to deliver his first full-year budget since Modi’s landslide election victory last May.

Reaping the benefits of low global prices for oil, India’s main import, Modi’s nationalist government says it is in a sweet spot with spare cash to modernise roads and railways without busting fiscal deficit and inflation targets.

Jaitley said it was time for a ‘quantum leap’ on reforms and that incremental change ‘is not going to take us anywhere’, building on expectations that the 2015/16 budget would deliver big-bang reforms.

BDST: 1359 HRS, FEB 28, 2015