She may wish to spend more, but can she?

"The government will frontload infrastructure spending in a bid to give the economy a boost and announce one or two more sets of stimulus measures aimed at reviving growth in the coming quarters, said finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman." The reason is that growth rate of the gross domestic product (GDP) dropped to 5% in the quarter ending 30 June. Manufacturing sector grew by just 0.6%. This was the lowest GDP growth rate in 6 years. "Consumption, the bedrock of growth in the past few years, collapsed to an 18-quarter low of 3.1% from 10.6% in the March quarter, pointing to a fragile sentiment." "A Bloomberg gauge of high-frequency indicators suggests that economic activity continued to weaken in July, with investment and consumption both falling." "Growth has now slipped below the long term trend of 6.6% for two consecutive quarters, which implies that India is effectively in a quasi-recession." said Teresa John of Nirmal Bang Equities. Singapore's DBS banking group revised this year's growth down to "6.2% from 6.8% projected earlier". But, Morgan Stanley predicts growth for the financial year to fall to 5.8%, while Nomura is even lower at 5.7%. "The entry-level car segment, which once formed a critical chunk of Indian car bazaar fulfilling the dream of many middle-class families to own a car, crashed by more than 56% in the first five months of this fiscal." Entry-level motorcycle sales have also declined by double digits. "Nearly 60,000 diamond workers are currently jobless across Gujarat, of which 13,000 are from Surat." "The total debts of Vodafone Idea and Tata Motors as on 31 March 2019 were Rs 1,08,524 crore (Rs 1.08 trillion) and Rs 91,124 crore (Rs 911 billion) respectively," while their market capitalisation is only Rs 14,396 crore and Rs 33,594 crore. Several companies with high debts may go under, throwing thousands of people out of work. Households have been "dipping into their savings in the recent past, and also leveraging themselves" which is restricting their ability to spend, wrote A Mehta. This is shown in the fall in personal loans to buy cars and durable items, such as televisions and refrigerators, wrote R Kishore. "Another disturbing trend in the personal loan data is the fact that educational loan growth has been falling continuously in the last decade and it has actually declined in the last two years." "India's per capita income now is around $1,800 per year (in exchange rate terms) -- awfully low and around one-fifth of China's," wrote S Chakrabarti, so we cannot afford to grow at a measly rate of 5%. "Only once the government creates demand for goods and services through extra deficit-spending will new jobs and incomes be generated," wrote A Ranade, so a "fiscal push is inevitable". The government has been massaging the fiscal deficit through off-budget borrowing, which could be over 5%, while the public sector borrowing requirement (PSBR) maybe 8.5-9%. Fitch Ratings warned India not to slip on its deficit because government debt is too high, though it sugar-coated it by predicting higher growth rate. The government can't spend and the people won't spend. Stuck where we are.