A quick guide to make sense of budget numbers
Live MintThe annual budget ritual in India follows a familiar script. On budget day, influential businessmen and ambitious economists outdo one another to provide the highest ‘ratings’ to the budget. One of the usual budget tricks is to state big hikes in percentage terms—say, a 25% hike in the rural development ministry outlay—and to state small hikes in absolute terms, such as, say, an increase of ₹5,000 crore in the allocation for the department of health and family welfare. Last year’s budget represented a rare attempt to clean up such hidden liabilities and come clean on the true deficit numbers. For instance, if the budget’s assumption of nominal gross domestic product growth seems a bit too high, you should be wary of all projections made by the budget, especially its estimates of government revenues.
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