BUDGET

An annual financial statement of income and expenditure is generally used for a government, but it could be of a firm, company, corporation etc.4 The ‘word’ has its origin in the British parliamentary exercise of preparing such statement way back in the mid-18th century from the French word ‘Bugeut’ meaning a leather bag out of which the financial statement was brought out and presented in the parliament. Today, this word is used to mean the annual statement in all economies around the world.

The Constitution of India has a provision (Art. 112) for such a document called Annual Financial Statement to be presented in the Parliament before the commencement of every new fiscal year—popular as the Union Budget. Same provision is there for the states, too.

Data in the Budget

The Union Budget has three sets5 of data for every concerned sector or sub- sector of the economy:

(i) Actual data of the preceding year (here preceding year means one year before the year in which the Budget is being presented. Suppose the Budget presented is for the year 2017–18, the Budget will give the final/actual data for the year 2015-16. After the data either we write ‘A’, means actual data/final data or write nothing (India writes nothing).

(ii) Provisional data of the current year (i.e., 2016–17) since the Budget for 2017–18 is presented at the end of the fiscal 2016–17, it provides Provisional Estimates for this year (shown as ‘PE’ in brackets with the data).

(iii) Budgetary estimates for the following year (here following year means one year after the year in which the Budget is being presented or the year for which the Budget is being presented, i.e., 2017–18). This is shown with the symbol ‘BE’ in brackets with the concerned data.).

One comes across certain other kinds of data, too in day-to-day government economic literature. There are three such data—