Talking about ballooning deficit our most revered Finance Minister said in Parliament," We have to be careful not to over-do ourselves in reaching this target ( 4.6% of GDP ) since that can have an excessive slowing down impact on growth." Meaning that he has no idea of how to keep deficit in control because he cannot control insane spending with so many state elections round the corner. The easy excuse for the rising deficit is to blame " foreign forces " i.e. turmoil in the Eurozone economies and the gridlock in Congress in Washington. He also went on to say that inflation, which is over 10% at this time, will come down to 6-7% by the end of March. But how? The rupee is down 15% against all major currencies. Blaming other countries does not wash. There has been a flight of money to the safe haven of the dollar so that inter bank lending in the US is down to zero. The Euro has fallen against the dollar by about 3 cents and the pound by 4 cents. The Yen is still at its highest levels against the dollar despite the Bank of Japan buying dollars to keep the Yen down. The fall of the rupee is not because of external factors but because of uncontrolled spending, deficit and inflation. The weaker rupee is going to increase cost of imports and commodities, especially oil, on which India is totally dependent. This will push up inflation or, if the government forbids rises at the pump, fiscal deficit. Said Mr Ahluwalia, Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission," By February you will see the January data and if it turns out that inflation is not coming down by then, then we really don't know what we are doing." Quite. We agree. Over to the World Famous economist.