Cooking the Nation's books - Part I

This post unlike my other posts was never meant to be. As with every other ordinary citizen the annual Budgeting exercise by the federal government held little significance for me, except for an understanding of what one has to fork out by way of taxes, prices for various commodities etcetera etcetera. This post is also, by the way, the culmination of two significant insights.

a. Never pre-judge
b. You don’t know what your elected governments (past, present and future) are upto!

It all started with one of the group companies, of the organisation which I work for, organising a talk on the latest budget by a certain gentleman from Delhi who wasn’t someone I had ever heard of. The budget had been, by then, declared, analysed, poked, rifled and sifted by the doyens of the industries and honchos from the various - some known, some unknown - trade bodies and chambers. Almost everyone in my organisation tasked to make the talk show a success thought, ‘Hey! We know the budget… it has been discussed threadbare…no surprises there, so what on earth is this guy going to talk about?’ The guys from the media, whom we had invited for the event, had turned up their noses and didn’t want to cover ‘stale’ news. I must admit that none of us knew what the guy was going to speak about but had all mentally decided that there couldn’t be anything new that we could learn – don’t we all watch TV and read the papers. Big mistake – the guy spoke what no one had spoken before. With a memory of an elephant he reeled off figures and statistics that showed how an elected government can hoodwink its own people and made bare to the audience the government’s utter failure at fiscal discipline even with an economist as the PM at the top of the political-bureaucratic pile. Thus the first insight – don’t ever pre-judge! The second insight, following furiously at the heels of the first, was more sombre and shocking. I had heard of fiscal deficit and how the government ends up spending more than it earns but the magnitude of the problem and how callously almost all governments, from the late 70’s onwards, have mishandled India’s finances is amazing. Thus I ended up downloading the latest budget statements from the government site and started my own poking and sifting, trying to make sense of all that governmental legalese.

This post, I fear, is going to get stretched, calling for a lot of scrolling, and those of you my dear readers who trudged along till this line, please bear with me. I have spilled this post into another to make for easier reading. The second part deals with the figures that appear in the latest budget and will hopefully reveal to you how the government pulls wool over our eyes.