I have a weakness for the pages of a Union Budget that television panels treat as furniture. Speeches supply the applause lines, but expenditure profiles, revised estimates and financing tables reveal what a government actually intends to do. Reading the official Budget 2026-27 documents, I find an administration still trying to perform a difficult balancing act: preserve public investment, narrow the fiscal deficit and resist turning every political demand into a permanent revenue commitment. That is less theatrical than announcing a universal giveaway and considerably more responsible. The fashionable criticism is that the government lacks one grand idea. I think continuity is the idea. India needs years of roads, railways, logistics, power networks, urban infrastructure and administrative repair, not a fresh ideological costume every February. The opposition’s preferred response—declare the exercise insufficiently compassionate, compare every allocation with an imaginary unlimited treasury and demand another rights-based scheme—confuses expenditure with outcomes. Money matters, but the composition, durability and implementation of spending matter more. A government that builds productive capacity is not being indifferent to households; it is trying to improve the economy from which households earn.
The virtue of refusing a sugar rush
Fiscal restraint rarely produces a grateful constituency. Nobody marches in support of a lower borrowing requirement, and no ribbon is cut when an interest bill grows more slowly than it otherwise would. Yet those dull achievements determine how much room future governments possess when a pandemic, commodity shock or security crisis arrives. The useful way to read the Budget is alongside the government’s own Budget at a Glance, where receipts, expenditure and deficit assumptions must eventually meet arithmetic. I do not regard every official projection as holy writ; revenue can disappoint and ministries can underspend. But the direction is defensible. India cannot simultaneously demand European welfare, East Asian infrastructure, low taxes, cheap credit and a permanently falling deficit. Choices are unavoidable. This government has generally preferred an investment-heavy settlement while expanding targeted welfare through digital delivery. That combination is intellectually sturdier than the old Congress formula of announcing programmes first and discovering leakages, unfunded liabilities and implementation gaps later. The reforms are incomplete, certainly, but incompleteness is not evidence of failure. It is an argument for staying the course.
Critics often answer that capital expenditure is an abstraction to a young graduate looking for work. I understand the impatience. A bridge does not hand someone an appointment letter merely because a minister mentions a multiplier. But infrastructure changes the cost of doing business, enlarges labour markets and makes previously marginal locations investible. The causal chain is slower than a cash transfer and therefore less rewarding on social media. It is still real. Better freight movement reduces inventory costs; reliable electricity supports factories and services; urban transit expands the radius within which people can accept jobs. The right criticism is not that public investment fails to matter. It is that project selection, contracting and maintenance must improve so that every rupee produces more usable infrastructure. I would welcome sharper parliamentary scrutiny of delayed projects and outcome measures. What I will not applaud is an opposition that attacks capital-led policy on Monday and complains about inadequate jobs, weak logistics and crowded cities on Tuesday, as though these problems occupy separate universes.
Reform is more than privatisation headlines
Another lazy habit is to define reform solely as a dramatic sale of a public-sector enterprise. Disinvestment matters, and the government has sometimes moved too cautiously. But administrative digitisation, transparent procurement, formalisation, tax-base expansion, insolvency rules, direct transfers and logistics improvements are reforms too. They alter incentives even when they do not generate a heroic front page. Congress-era nostalgia edits out how frequently policy was paralysed by discretionary permissions, retrospective uncertainty and schemes whose beneficiaries existed more reliably in files than on the ground. The current government should not pretend that technology automatically eliminates discretion; portals can create new bottlenecks and faceless systems can become unaccountable. Still, replacing personal gatekeepers with auditable processes is progress. My frustration is that ministers undersell this institutional story and oversell individual announcements. They should publish clearer dashboards showing delivery, delays, cost overruns and measurable benefits. Confidence is strengthened by inspectable evidence, not by adjectives.
Tax policy remains the place where I am least inclined to offer automatic applause. India still changes rules too frequently, imposes considerable compliance burdens on honest small firms and sometimes mistakes data collection for good administration. A stable, comprehensible tax system is infrastructure just as surely as a highway is. The government deserves credit when it simplifies, but it must recognise that a notification can undo the goodwill created by a speech. Middle-class taxpayers are not wrong to ask what they receive in return. Their complaint becomes less persuasive only when it mutates into the belief that a country of India’s needs can provide first-world public goods with a wafer-thin tax base. The answer is broader compliance, predictable rates and better services—not populist abolition followed by hidden levies. I would also like state governments to face more scrutiny because citizens experience taxation and public services across layers of government, while political debate conveniently assigns every pothole and hospital queue to New Delhi.
The opposition’s arithmetic-free alternative
The INDIA alliance has every right to argue for different priorities. What it rarely supplies is a credible hierarchy. Its politics tends to offer each audience a separate promise: more subsidies, more reservations, more government posts, wider guarantees, lower prices and resistance to reforms that might generate the revenue required for any of them. Congress invokes an older moral vocabulary of redistribution while neglecting the administrative failures that weakened its own programmes. Redistribution without growth becomes a contest over stagnation; growth without a safety net is politically brittle. The Modi government’s broad synthesis—public investment, formalisation, targeted welfare and gradual consolidation—is not flawless, but it at least attempts to reconcile the two. Calling this “pro-corporate” is not analysis. Businesses build capacity, employ people and pay taxes; the state’s job is to ensure competition rather than treat profit itself as suspicious. When favoured firms receive undue protection, critics should identify the rule and evidence. Vague insinuation is a substitute for policy.
There is a serious counterargument. Investment-led growth can become top-heavy if credit, land and contracts remain easiest for large incumbents to obtain. Small businesses bear compliance costs less comfortably, and construction cannot substitute indefinitely for productive manufacturing jobs. I accept that concern. The response should be stronger competition policy, simpler regulation, faster commercial justice and much better vocational preparation. It should not be a return to licence-permit instincts or indiscriminate loan waivers. Nor should the government assume that announcing a scheme creates a supply chain. Ministries must disclose domestic value addition, employment quality and the longevity of subsidised projects. I give the government the benefit of the doubt because its chosen direction is broadly right, not because execution is beyond criticism. Supporters do no favour to reform by treating every target as an achievement before a factory, worker or exporter has materialised.
Judge the state by what it can sustain
My test for a Budget is not whether every group receives a paragraph. It is whether the document improves the state’s capacity to keep promises over a decade. That means borrowing for productive assets rather than routine political comfort, protecting vulnerable citizens without making dependency the organising principle of government and creating rules that survive the minister who announced them. Budget 2026 advances that project more than its detractors admit. The government should now make implementation less opaque, explain deviations honestly and accelerate reforms in taxation, cities and factor markets. Those are substantial demands, but they emerge from confidence in the project rather than nostalgia for the system it replaced. India does not need a February carnival followed by eleven months of excuses. It needs boring competence repeated long enough to become institutional habit. I will take that over the opposition’s arithmetic-free compassion, however elegantly packaged.
