A WISH LIST?

Union Budget for 2026-27 conveys the impression of a roll-call of intentions and ambitious proposals, with little detail on their formulation

- KIRAN PANDEY, PUJA DAS, SHAGUN, HIMANSHU NITNAWARE, RAJU SAJWAN, BHAGIRATH, VIVEK MISHRA AND PULAHA ROY

BY THE time Union Minister of Finance Nirmala Sitharaman finished her near 90-minute speech on February 1, it was clear that the Union Budget presentation and its character had changed. In recent years, the Union budget has turned into a grand posturing of intents, with proposals increasingly spanning over years.

From “Viksit Bharat” to “Sabka Sath, Sabka Vikas”, “Amrit Kal” to the current “Kartavya”, the Union government has assigned the annual budget with a policy objective that sounds more like a character tag with time periods of attainment ranging from “the next five years” to 2047—the year when the government has promised to make India a developed economy.

The proposed Union Budget for 2026-27 is no exception. Of the 177 proposals or paragraphs in Sitharaman’s budget speech, more than half dealt with policy frameworks or just intents, with most of the new committed proposals seeing budgetary allocations spread over five years.

Consider this. The budget proposes to position India as a global biopharmaceutical manufacturing hub, allocating ₹10,000 crore over the next five years. Scaling up carbon capture utilisation and storage technologies is backed by an outlay of ₹20,000 crore, spread over five years. Another proposal to unlock the cities’ economic power—with reference to specific “city economic regions”—the budget sets aside ₹5,000 crore per region, again, over five years.

Some new proposals carry no explicit budgetary allocation. These include the ambitious plans to create five university townships, set up girls’ hostels in every district, launch Bharat-VISTAAR scheme, a multilingual artificial intelligence (AI) tool for agriculture, and establish Self-Help Enterprise (SHE)-Marts or community-owned retail outlets.