Even as most taxpayers will be busy this coming week making plans for the year-end and the New Year, Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman and her colleagues will be pouring over numbers and cogitating over ideas finalising the Budget statement and speech scheduled for February 1. While the speech itself goes through several drafts till almost the very last day, with the Prime Minister giving his imprimatur, the budgetary numbers and major proposals would be in the pipeline by early January. What the government has to do and can do would depend to a large extent on those numbers.
The annual Budget speech of the Narendra Modi government has stuck to a pattern over the years. Half the speech is devoted to making claims about all the good work done and the other half to what is proposed to be done. There is very little focus on the actual stuff of an annual fiscal statement to Parliament, on why revenue estimates have departed from Budget estimates and on the implications of various proposals on the expenditure side and the revenue side.
The real scrutiny of the Budget is left to analysts who spend the next few days analysing Budget proposals. In any case, few are interested in anything more than what the tax proposals mean for their home budgets. All the grand plans and proposals are for party spokespersons to sell on prime time.
With the introduction of the Goods and Services Tax, the annual Budget speech has been robbed of some of its usual excitement since there was a ti.