‘Focus on tax and spending reforms in FY25 budget’

livemint.com:

NEW DELHI : The full-year budget, to be presented in Parliament after the national elections, will likely focus on expenditure reforms and encourage businesses and individuals to shift to the new simplified and exemption-less tax regime, said Bibek Debroy, the chairperson of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Economic Advisory Council (EAC-PM). In an interview, Debroy said by the time the full-year budget is presented, the terms of the Sixteenth Finance Commission to decide on the sharing of the Centre’s divisible pool of taxes with states for the five years from 2026-27 will come out, indicating overall expenditure reforms needed at central and state levels. India’s economy is expected to grow in the range of 6.5-7% in the medium term, Debroy said.

Edited excerpts: It is a question that cannot really be answered. One reason is the moment you say what the budget should concentrate on, you are implicitly suggesting that whatever the budget concentrated on earlier was wrong and, therefore, something else should be concentrated on. But budgets have been a continuous process.

So, it is not that you should expect something completely new to happen. It will be incremental. The second reason why I think it is the wrong question to ask is, we, of course, do not know what the electoral cycle will be…depends on the Election Commission and on everything else.

But if you project on the basis of whatever one can reasonably hazard a guess about, it is not going to be a full budget. It will be a vote on account. A vote on account obviously means it is essentially a statement of receipts and expenditures.