Yet another Budget is around the corner. Even ordinary people are throwing themselves at its mercy and deliberating and discussing its ramifications. Does it all matter? Is the life of commoners going to change for the better? Life will go on with or without the budgetary smorgasbord.

GREAT INDIAN POLITICAL ANIMAL

A tax here or an Act there would be tweaked and operated upon by the mandarins of Finance Ministry. Sound bytes in the public domain will be bandied, about variously spouting — will GST be introduced finally, will VAT be dropped, and so on and so forth. Something would be dropped and something else sneaked in. The result: a huge drain on the Exchequer, which has to bankroll the entire meaningless process. We are woefully inadequate and fail to achieve any of these costly budgetary prescriptions, a la the Five-Year plans.

The term ‘budget' comes from an old French word bougette, meaning purse. Far from being a money dispenser, the fiscal budget is merely a bone of contention for our politicians to argue and debate fruitlessly in Parliament — which is what they are adept at doing anyway. They are lean on action, except where political self-interest cajoles them to practise vote bank politics. Here, ‘might is right' seems to be the key word. So, those in majority of a population benefit at the expense of those groups which are in a minority, and hence of limited use to the great Indian political animal.

NATIONAL RESURRECTION

We can do away with the annual budget which has been reduced to a national pantomime. Instead, it is time to develop and adopt a one-time public finance charter, somewhat along the lines of our Constitution, and which envisages the necessary anodyne for national development and prosperity. The conception and adoption of this socio-economic master plan can be undertaken by the government in consultation with stalwarts in various fields, in a meeting of minds, to work out this rubric of national resurrection.

(The author is a freelance writer.)

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