India Budget to balance capex, social agenda, says Nomura's Sonal Varma

"India will have the benefit of lower subsidy bills, helped by a fall in international fertilizer prices and a readjustment of the nation's free food program," she said

India’s government will likely increase capital expenditure for the next fiscal year, though the size of the jump may be lower than previous budgets because of a broader economic slowdown, said Sonal Varma, an economist for Nomura Holdings Inc.

“The primary focus for the budget will be to push up public capex, or rather to continue to push on public capex, because private capex hasn’t really picked up and is unlikely to pick up in the next 12 months,” Varma said in an interview with Bloomberg Television’s Rishaad Salamat. 

Unlike the current fiscal year, which ends in March,