Hours before Budget 2019 presentation, Congress makes 'Budget leak' claim

Senior Congress leader Manish Tewari on Friday, just hours before NDA government's final budget presentation, alleged that a few points relating to the Union budget were being leaked to the media personnel.

Taking to Twitter, the former I&B minister posted a number of screenshots and suggested that should the pointers mentioned in the images were to be part of the budget, it can then be amounted to a 'budget leak'.

"These pointers are being Circulated to Media people by Govt Sources . If all this or substantive amount of these proposals find reflection in the budget would it not tantamount to a BUDGET LEAK?" his Twitter post read.

A lot of controversy has already surrounded the last budget of the present NDA regime, which came to power in 2014. Opposition had claimed that the government was trying to present a full budget instead of an interim budget, which is the usual case in the election year. 

"The NDA-BJP government does not have the electoral mandate and it does not have the electoral legitimacy to present six full budgets in five years," Manish Tewari had said on the stroke of the budget.

But the Finance Ministry on Thursday, a day before the budget was to be presented, made it crystal clear that the upcoming budget would be called as the 'interim budget 2019-20', and not a regular budget.

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Railways and Coal Minister Piyush Goyal, stand-in Finance Minister in the absence of Arun Jaitley, would be presenting the interim budget for the financial year 2019-20. Hours before delivering his budget speech, the interim FM met President Ram Nath Kovind.