The Union budget is one of the most important documents released by the government. It not only defines the country’s priorities, but also its economic agenda. It determines how much money our schools, child care programs and hospitals receive. It incorporates decisions on everything from education to health care to taxes – things that affect people’s lives in significant ways. The pages of the budget can, quite literally, mean the life or death of important programs in the country.
Even more important than what a budget says it will do is what it actually ends up delivering. Do funds allocated to schools, clinics, or roads actually go on to finance those things, or are they instead diverted to another program – or an official’s pocket?
This is where we hit a roadblock. Because the budget can also be super-difficult to decipher – full of complicated jargon – it is no easy task to read, forget figure out where exactly all the money goes.
We, at Youth Ki Awaaz, think that’s hardly fair. So, we caught up with retired JNU professor Arun Kumar, a noted economist to simplify the budget, so that you can understand the budget better and hold the government accountable for the things it has promised.