As part of pre-Budget deliberations, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will meet infrastructure and financial sector honchos on Thursday to seek their inputs for Budget 2022-23.

       The two consultations with different stakeholder groups will be held virtually, the Finance Ministry said.

       "Finance minister Smt. @nsitharaman will be holding consultations with experts of Industry, Infrastructure & Climate Change in forenoon; and experts of Financial Sector and Capital Markets in afternoon," the ministry said in a tweet.

       It will be the fourth Budget of Modi 2.0 government and Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman. The Budget would come against the backdrop of gradual recovery taking place in the Indian economy hit by the COVID-19 pandemic.

       The growth this fiscal year is expected to be in double-digit. The RBI in its latest bi-monthly monetary policy review pegged a GDP growth of 9.5 per cent in 2021-22.

       The government has projected a fiscal deficit of 6.8 per cent of the gross domestic product (GDP).

       The Budget 2022-23 is likely to be presented on February 1 during the first half of Parliament's Budget session which usually begins in the last week of January every year.

       Earlier in the day, farmer organisations and agri experts pressed for MSP based on realistic cost of production, higher subsidies on diesel and allowing new technologies like genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in their pre-Budget submission to the finance ministry.

       Ministers of State for Finance Pankaj Chaudhary and Bhagwat Karad held the first pre-Budget consultation with representatives of agriculture and agro processing industry through virtual mode.

       The Budget for next year will have to address critical issues of demand generation, job creation and putting the economy on a sustained 8 per cent plus growth path.

       Budget 2022-23 would come against the backdrop of surging cases of Omicron variant. The impact of this on the economy, however, is likely to be less severe due to rapid vaccination.

       India will be among only a few economies in the world to rebound strongly from COVID-19-induced economic contraction of 2020-21, a Finance Ministry report said.

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