Basu said the budget was presented at a time when the national economy was confronted with a serious economic crisis... ``following a policy of so-called economic reforms and indiscriminate liberalisation under the IMF conditionalities since 1991-92.''

Basu said ``despite the failure of IMF model in our country and other parts of the world, the Union Budget has repeated the IMF-line and has failed to provide any new direction to alleviate the critical problems of unemployment and inflation.''

Criticizing the budget for reducing the fund allocations for rural employment, poverty alleviation, agriculture,industry, irrigation and power, Basu said the Centre had chosen to shift the burden on common people for resource mobilisation programme. He said: ``Hike in the price of diesel is a case in point.''

Later, state Finance Minister Ashim Dasgupta said that ``It's unfortunate that the BJP-led coalition followed the same economic prescription which ruined several nations in Asia.''

Elaborating his point Dasgupta said, ``It's time we developed our own concept of economic reforms instead of following IMF prescription.''