Budget musings

Years ago, a wise political scientist reprimanded me for my lack of interest in the Union Budget. I saw the Budget as a fait accompli. I felt it was legislation by number, an accountant’s fiat replacing the legislative act. The old man disapproved. He said a Budget thoughtfully done is one of the wisest conversations possible. A Budget is a symbolic act, a performance; it is one way of renewing the social contract.
The Budget, my teacher claimed, links oikos, the domestic space, with the polis, the public domain. Not only does it combine domestic and the public, it hyphenates the housewife and the state, the feminine and the masculine. A Budget is a moral statement of who the stakeholders are and a calculus of who benefits from economic policy. The Budget is the one performance the state cannot wish away.
A Budget is a ritual performance. It raises a whole set of moral, legal and political questions. Take the question of transparency. A whiff of the Budget can swing enormous deals in real estate. All too often the Budget has been seen as an act of esoteric expertise to be sprung on a people. For the first time, the government is having interactions with civil society. Citizens have an opportunity to make suggestions. They sense how funds are allocated and utilised. Citizens in Kerala discussing the Budget are discovering there is little accountability of funds at the panchayat level. They are acquiring a sense of why funds do not reach the poor and, more critically, what needs to be done about it.
K.K. Mani, state finance minister of Kerala, in fact argued that all sections of the Budget, except the taxation proposals, should be made public. Viewed this way, the Budget becomes democratic, an instrument of public policy rather than a weapon of the state. Following the Budget is like following a trail of different projects and sensing which work and which fail.
A discussion held in Kashmir provided possibilities of such an exercise. At a meeting in Srinagar, J&K’s minister for finance and Ladakh affairs Abdul Rahim Rather claimed that pre-Budget meetings helped associate people with the Budget. But mere association is not enough. Participation has to lead to empowerment. One needs a citizen’s section in Budget-making. The minister, in fact, claimed that it was as a result of citizens’ pressure that the agricultural sector was almost tax-free in the state.
Unfortunately, the Budget becomes a chorus of stereotypes with business never satiated, demanding a pro-investment, anti-inflationary Budget. A Budget is always a movement of speculation, of anticipation. Yet, the illiteracy of our democracy lies in never capturing the drama of our Budget.
One question is always asked in terms of a sense of balance and justice. A predictable question is whether a Budget is a pro-rich Budget. The rich, the middle class and the poor become three collective protagonists in such a contest. C. Rangarajan, the Prime Minister’s economic adviser, has argued that one should impose a surcharge on income above a certain threshold.
Mr Rangarajan, sensing the tightness of money, felt that people with higher incomes should pay more.
A Budget turns every economist into an expert. The amount of advice a government gets is amazing. One wonders if Budgets become games where accountants and economists play the game of prediction. It would be interesting to see how many groups come close to a realistic sense of the Budget.
Psephologists stake their reputation by going public on their predictions. It would be interesting if different groups could list out their predictions so that their audience could gauge the quality of their perspectives.
One wishes that the media would publish a Budget workbook so that students could master its dynamism, its rules, and obtain a better sense of evaluation. Citizenship, after all, is a form of expertise and one feels a Budget should not be an act of deskilling.
A Budget is an act of political will. One has to see whether the United Progressive Alliance has the will and the skill to make tough decisions. How will the government boost the demand for credit and its supply? Should foreign banks play a bigger role? Should the government hand out new banking licences? How does one balance greed and need at this moment?
Yet, one often wonders whether the common man, not as an abstract figure but as a set of concrete life experiences, is even part of the Budget. At a time when petrol prices are up, inflation recalcitrant, one wonders whether the numbers floating around make any sense of his life. I remember Arvind Kejriwal, the anti-corruption activist, observing sceptically that for the common man numbers make little sense; his life is an endless struggle.
A pre-Budget week in that sense becomes a moment of hype. Once the epidemic of speculations and predictions are over, one often senses a routine Budget, where little has been done. One senses little political imagination and less financial skill. Of course the performance of the week is that of the finance minister’s, but whether he is Falstaff, Hamlet or a more daring character is yet to be seen.
Reading the newspapers provides little understanding of what is a critical issue. Budget forecasting varies between a weather report and an astrological prediction. But looking merely at the short term would be short-sightedness. One needs to unravel the process, provide a glossary of terms, unravel strategies, learn about interest groups and stakeholders. A Budget should involve every citizen. Sadly, he appears after the fact. The whole sense of a Budget as a black box is a failure of public policy. Transparency, debate and a ritual of skilling can make one of the oldest instruments of governance a part of a new imagination, indicating involvement rather than fatalism and helplessness. The Budget, like the monsoon, cannot be one of the unpredictables of public policy.

The writer is a social science nomad