Budget 2025-26: Don’t let electoral politics extract too high a price

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. With less than a fortnight to go before India’s budget for 2025-26, all eyes are on finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman. Apart from all the usual reasons, this budget has special relevance, as it is the first full-year fiscal plan after last summer’s Lok Sabha elections.

It comes after the interim budget on 1 February 2024 and the one presented in July for the remaining eight months of 2024-25. The forthcoming budget, thus, is both an opportunity and a challenge for the Narendra Modi government. While it offers the administration a chance to showcase its achievements of the past eleven years and lay down priorities for the next four, the demands made of it have grown.

Unlike the previous two Lok Sabha terms when the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party had a majority on its own, Modi 3.0 is dependent on two coalition allies: Telugu Desam Party of Andhra Pradesh and Janata Dal (United) of Bihar. Given the pressures of realpolitik, this budget will almost certainly reflect this duo’s interests. We saw glimpses of it in July, with these two states singled out for special budgetary support.

We can expect more along these lines this time as well. The budget is expected to retain its “focus on four major castes, ‘Garib’ (Poor), ‘Mahilayen’ (Women), ‘Yuva’ (Youth) and ‘Annadata’ (Farmer)’ with particular emphasis on employment, skilling, MSMEs, and the middle class." The interim budget’s broad thrust in nine areas of priority, such as productivity and resilience in agriculture, employment and skilling, manufacturing and services, and infrastructure, especially, is also unlikely to shift. With varying emphasis, all this is part and parcel of every budget.