Delhi's ₹1L-cr budget focuses on infra boost, sanitation, healthcare

Delhi chief minister Rekha Gupta on Tuesday tabled a bumper ₹1 lakh crore state budget for 2025-26, a 44% jump in the size, fuelled largely by central fund inflows to revive the Capital's flagging infrastructure, solve its sanitation crisis, bolster health systems, and shore up the public transport fleet.

- Alok KN Mishra

NEW DELHI:

Gupta, who is also the finance minister, delivered a marathon 138-minute speech, littered with potshots at the previous Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)-led government and her predecessor Arvind Kejriwal, and punctuated with couplets by poets Mirza Ghalib, Bashir Badr and Harivansh Rai Bachchan.

"This is not an ordinary budget. This budget is not just an account of the government's income and expenditure but is the first resolved step taken towards the development of Delhi, which has become miserable and worse in the last 10 years," said Gupta.

"The double engine government will take New Delhi forward at the speed of a bullet train and Delhi will emerge as the 'growth engine' of the country," she said, a reference to Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) governments at the Centre and the UT.

The 2025-26 budget estimate is 31.5% higher than the budget estimates (BE) in 2024-25 of ₹76,000 crore, and 44% higher than the revised estimates (RE) of ₹69,500 crore.