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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 Rs 10,000 crore over the next five years. Scaling up carbon capture utilisation and storage technologies is backed by an outlay of Rs 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 Rs 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.
The budget has been framed against an unfavourable economic and geopolitical backdrop. One, nominal GDP (gross domestic product) growth for 2025-26, according to advance estimates, is projected around 8 per cent—the weakest in four years. Two, private corporate investment and foreign direct investment have nearly dried up, cutting fuel to the economy. Three, uncertain global trade regime has made investment risky.
On the other hand, rural wage rate has remained near stagnant for over a decade, eroding people’s capacity to spend. So, the current budget, ideally, should be a stimulant one. But that is not the case. The proposed expenditure in the budget as a share of GDP...
This article was originally published in the February 16-28, 2026 print edition of Down To Earth