Irrelevance of the Budget

Irrelevance of the Budget The narrower the government's fiscal options get, the stronger, it appears, is the urge to make extravagant claims on behalf of the annual budget. Finance minister S B Chavan sees his budget for 1989-90 as achieving a number of ambitious objectives- promoting productive employment, protecting the consumption standards of the poor, discouraging non-essential consumption, providing relief to middle income tax-payers, maintaining the tempo of industrial growth and containing the budgetary deficit. But what the budget really does is to bring out how irrelevant the whole budget-making exercise has become.