India Union Budget 2007-08: A Preview

I am not one of the millions of Indians who enjoy the ritual of the Indian Union Budget on 28th Feb every year. But this year I was determined to discover what the hulla boola is all about.

So I scanned the daily papers and the mid year review of Budget 2006-07, Guidelines to prepare the Outcome Budget 2007-08 and was left high and dry. But being a determined person, I made a second attempt at going through all the jargon and decided to sleep over it ( A daily claimed that when you sleep over a problem, it gets solved)

But I woke up in the middle of the night with my wife giving her comforting and annoyed smile. "Things will be OK, don't worry and go to sleep" and let me sleep too!

"Imagine if I earned Rs 4.15 lacs and spent Rs 5.63 lacs in a year, how will you react?", I said. Now my wife got afraid that I had got into some trouble/bad company and was wide awake.

But when I told her that it's our nation who is doing that, she went back to sleep.

But this is what was planned in the Union Budget 2006-07. An planned income of Rs 4.15 lac crore and Expenditure of Rs 5.63 lac crore. And this has been happening for quite some time now, I guess. It's called Fiscal deficit.

But I'm told there are whole bunch of nations doing that. And US have the largest fiscal deficit($319 Billion in 2005!)

Wait. I'm also told that fiscal deficit is not all that bad. Infact the extra expenditure by the Government generates aggregated demand in the economy, with the result that economic objectives of price stability, full employment and economic growth is achieved. Amazing!

The budget means a lot of things to a lot of people. Every industry looks forward for incentives, schemes and fair taxation laws. I think I'll spread the posts on Budget to make it easy for me to understand it. After all I'm doing it for the first time!

In the meanwhile read about my thoughts on FRBM Act

One of the most incisive budget commentary for the last year came from a guy who says,"My father is (was, he is retired as of March 1) a professor of Economics at IIMC and my mother is a Masters in Economics from the University of Rochester." So read his budget mysteries and learn. I enjoyed reading it.

Reviews, Tips, Calculators with an Indian perspective.