Finance minister Pranab Mukherjee said the government has taken several measures to counter the negative fall-out of the global slowdown on the Indian economy.

Firstly the Government responded by providing three focused fiscal stimulus packages in the form of tax relief to boost demand and increased expenditure on public projects to create employment and public assets.

Secondly, the RBI took a number of monetary easing and liquidity enhancing measures to facilitate flow of funds from the financial system to meet the needs of productive sectors.

Presenting the budget for 2009-10 in the Lok Sabha today, Mukherjee said that this fiscal accommodation led to an increase in fiscal deficit from 2.7 per cent in 2007-08 to 6.2 per cent of GDP in 2008-09. The difference between the actual of 2007-08 and 2008-09 constituted the total fiscal stimulus.

This fiscal stimulus at 3.5 per cent of GDP at current market prices for 2008-09 amounts to Rs186,000 crore.

He said that the efforts would be continued to provide further stimulus to the economy.