No delay please

Union Budget date should not be postponed

Replying to the Election Commission of India (EC), the government has done well to stand by its decision to present the Union Budget on February 1. The EC had asked the government to respond by Tuesday on the question of delaying the Budget, following representations by several political parties seeking a postponement of the Budget date. The Opposition’s argument is that the Budget for 2017-18 is scheduled to be presented too close to Assembly elections in five states and, as such, the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government at the Centre might circumvent the EC’s model code of conduct and use the Budget to announce sops for the states in question. 

The EC could have dismissed the charges instead of going through the process of asking the Centre to respond. The commission announced the dates of Assembly elections only at the start of 2017, well after the declaration by the government about the revised date for the Budget. In fact, it has been almost six months now that the government announced its intention of presenting an early Budget. It begs the question why the Opposition and the EC did not raise an alarm earlier because the fact that the Assembly schedules were coming to an end in the first half of 2017 was also known all along. Article 172 of the Constitution stipulates that, barring the proclamation of an Emergency, “every Legislative Assembly of every State, unless sooner dissolved, shall continue for five years from the date appointed for its first meeting and no longer…”  The EC is supposed to conduct elections in the six months leading up to the expiration of the five-year term. Given the fact that the government had announced the date for an early Budget, the EC, if it thought that an early Budget would in any way jeopardise the election result, could have chosen a different date, to begin with.

The fact is that the government’s decision to advance the date of the Budget is based on altogether different, and justifiable, reasons. For one, doing so will allow the government to have the Budget passed before the start of the financial year for which it is actually meant. Under the system followed until the last financial year, the Budget used to be passed by the middle of May. That meant, from the expenditure point of view, the first six weeks of the new year were largely lost. An early Budget also does away with a vote on account and saves Parliament from a lot of procedural hassles and time wastage. Moreover, just like the Assembly elections, the annual Budget, too, is a Constitutional requirement. Neither history nor any reason supports the argument that the Centre’s most important annual exercise be disrupted every time an Assembly election is due to take place. Not to mention the fact that the Union Budget is for the whole country, not for any one particular state. By convention, the central government avoids announcing any scheme or policy that could be construed as a political allurement enhancing its chances in state elections. If this confusion regarding the Budget date shows anything, it is the lack of coordination between the EC and the Union government.