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Ignoring the clamour, Gowda kept it short & simple!

If you believe the Railway budget presented by Sadanand Gowda was only a conventional exercise and had no new element, think again.

Ritu Raj and Pankaj Sharma/Zee Research Group/Delhi
If you believe the Railway budget presented by Sadanand Gowda was only a conventional exercise and had no new element, think again. Apart from the content read out by the Railway Minister, there were some interesting aspects to the budget. For instance, Gowda spent 62 minutes to complete his budget speech, barring the break where he drank a glass of water. During his budget speech, he had to face disruption caused by MPs of other parties 13 times. Gowda rebuked his critics five times during the course of his speech. Moreover, he also got the applause from the House a dozen times. The budget speech prepared by Gowda was short and precise in many senses. The speech was of 32 pages, which is the shortest in recent time. In the last four years, Dinesh Trivedi’s budget (2012-13) had a maximum of 62 pages, followed by Pawan Kumar Bansal’s budget which had 49 pages. Furthermore, Mamata Banerjee’s budget (2011-12) speech had 47 pages. The interim budget presented by Mallikarjun Kharge earlier this year had a total of 18 pages. The speech had also carried the names of just a few individuals. While Gowda used the name of Narendra Modi four times, he spoke twice about Atal Bihari Vajpayee in his speech. Names of Mahatma Gandhi and Swami Vivekananda were also used once each. Paying special attention to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Gowda used Ahmedabad (the capital of Gujarat) six times and his constituency (Varanasi) five times. The words Bengaluru and Karnataka were used for 14 and one time, respectively. He used four quotations in his speech — twice in Sanskrit and one each in English and Kannada. The Union minister used the word “safety” twelve times. In recent past, Dinesh Trivedi used the word maximum 41 times in his budget speech followed by Pawan Kumar Bansal (14 times). Kharge and Mamata Banerjee also used “safety” for six and four times, respectively, in their budget speeches.