In style, substance and length, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley's third Budget conformed to pattern. Instead of treating the Budget as a factual annual statement of revenue and expenditure of the financial year gone by and the financial year ahead, no ruling establishment has desisted from the temptation of leveraging the Budget as a massive political exercise to promote its agenda. Mr Jaitley, thus, took more than two hours to deliver his speech - interlaced with the usual quotes from favoured poets, writers and thinkers and homilies about the government's national priorities and so on.
But even by the lax standards of Budget speechifying, Mr Jaitley could have reduced the duration of this year's exercise by at least half an hour had he omitted large chunks that were apparently extraneous and, in some cases, decidedly mystifying. There is, as the Americans would say, "too much information". For instance, soon after he informed the House that he had allocated Rs 850 crore for an e-market portal for cattle, he referred, quite non sequitur, to the "visible rise" in the production of honey. If there was a Budget allocation to encourage this rise further, the finance minister did not disclose it in the speech. This trend is, in fact, visible several paragraphs before which could have many analysts justifiably wondering what place these statements could have in the Budget speech. There are stray references to dedicating a unified e-marketing platform to the nation on Ambedkar's birthday on April 14, a revision of assistance norms under the National Disaster Response Fund, and a long explanation on how the government proposed to ensure that the benefits of the Minimum Support Price would reach farmers in all parts of the country. There is also a lengthy digression into sanitation and cleanliness which, Mr Jaitley gravely reminds us, was "very close to the heart of the Father of the Nation". He takes time to marvel at the fact that thanks to this government, the issue has, apparently, become "the topic of discussion in almost every home". How much was he allocating to what is essentially the Swachh Bharat programme? Only a scrutiny of the Expenditure Budget will enlighten anyone.
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Along the way, Mr Jaitley tells his listeners about this government's plans to set up stores for affordable medicine, put in place an "enabling architecture" for 10 public and private institutions "to emerge as world class teaching and research institutions", amend the Motor Vehicles Act to encourage public transport and introduce a model law for states to follow to enable shops and establishments to stay open longer. There are also detours to announce new initiatives for public-private partnerships, on the efforts to improve ease of doing business (which is old news) and a new policy for management of government investment in public enterprises courtesy the NITI Aayog. To be sure, these are all interesting bits of information but they could easily have been relegated to press releases that could have been issued anytime during the government's tenure.
The predilection for making the Union Budget speech a kind of State of the Union address may be understandable in a country in which the government still dominates economic activity. But it is worth noting that in the US, the world's largest economy and sole superpower, the federal budget - with a bill of $3.8 trillion that overshadows the Indian Union Budget of $0.3 trillion by several orders of magnitude - is a low-key event. As for the State of the Union address, most Presidents have kept their speeches under an hour, only Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama exceeding 60 minutes. There must be a lesson there for our finance ministers.
