Indian Finance Minister Arun Jaitley yesterday announced a budget that put boosting growth before painful reforms, slowing the pace of fiscal deficit cuts and seeking to put domestic and foreign capital to work.

In his first full-year budget since Prime Minister Narendra Modi's landslide election victory last May, Jaitley said India's economy was about to take off. Modi tweeted that the budget would "further reignite our growth engine".

Billed as a test of the nationalist premier's willingness to reform a $2 trillion economy with a bloated public sector and weak private investment, the budget was short on structural reforms and contained revenue targets some called unrealistic and drew a mixed reception from economists.