Big Bonanza - Conditions Apply

Health Care 10 Crore poor families to Get Insurance up to ₹ 5,00,000

Rural Infra ₹ 14.34 Lakh Crore Amount to Be Spent on Infrastructure to Connect Farmers and Markets Allocation of ₹ 56,619 Crore for Scheduled Castes and ₹ 39,135 Crore for Scheduled Tribes

- Prosenjit Datta

The Union Finance Minister actually presents two different Budgets every year. The first is the Budget his speech is all about – it focuses on the policy or political messages he (or more accurately, the Prime Minister) wants to convey to his audience, both within the Parliament and among the citizens of the country. The second is the one which is contained in the minutiae and the fine print of the Budget documents that are tabled.

The first is easy to react to. The second takes hours of poring over the figures and the changes to fully understand the implications. For some finance ministers, there is a broad match between the two. That is, the major initiatives that the minister talks about in his speech are also the ones that find the biggest allocations in the expenditure. Equally often though, there is a sharp divergence. All the things the finance minister tom toms are very different from the “real” message conveyed in the revenue and expenditure parts of the budget documents or even the other details of the different documents.

When Finance Minister Arun Jaitley presented the Budget on February 1, the political messaging of his speech could not have been sharper. But the budget papers themselves don’t necessarily tally with all the messages he was seeking to convey.