India, Jan. 18 -- Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman's conspicuous absence from key pre-budget interactions between the Prime Minister with policymakers and industrialists has sparked off speculation of a change of guard at the ministry. The consensus is that this will happen post budget (because anyway it is the PMO and not the Finance Ministry that is the key architect of the budget); but there is no consensus on the replacement. Some say the PM could follow the Jaishankar model and bring in a technocrat like K.V. Kamath into the ministry. Others point to the fact that while Nirmala was absent from the Niti Aayog meet, three other ministers were there flanking the PM-Piyush Goyal, Nitin Gadkari and Amit Shah. Goyal, as we know, was a f...