From railways to farming: Here are the highlights of Union Budget 2017

Here are the top highlights from finance minister Arun Jaitley’s speech so far.

The government expanded its spending across several sectors in the Union budget on Wednesday, with rural, railways and farm sectors emerging as key focus areas. Here are the top highlights from finance minister Arun Jaitley’s speech so far:

Railways and farm sectors emerged as key focus areas in the Union Budget 2017, presented by finance minister Arun Jaitley on Wednesday. (Sonu Mehta/HT File Photo)

Railways

• Service charge on e-tickets booked through IRCTC to go

• 500 stations to be made disabled friendly by providing lifts, escalators

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• All coaches to have bio-toilets by 2019

• A rail safety fund with corpus of Rs 100,000 crore to be created over five years

Rural development

• Highest ever allocation for MNREGA at Rs 48,700 crore

• 10 million rural household to be pulled out of poverty

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• Allocation for agricultural and allied sectors 24% higher than last year

• All villages to be electrified by May 1, 2018

Farming

• Agriculture sector growth seen at 4.1%

• Farm credit target fixed at Rs 10 lakh crore

• Dairy processing infrastructure fund to be set up under Nabard, with fund of 8,000 crore

Read | Budget 2017: Higher spending on farming, skill development for rural economy

• Assistance of upto Rs 75 lakh for cleaning and packaging of farmer produce

• Nabard to be supported to create 63,000 functional primary agricultural credit societies at an estimated cost of Rs 1,900 crore