I have a mildly antisocial habit: when television panels begin shouting about a Union Budget, I stop listening and open the expenditure documents. Speeches are invitations to applaud. Tables are where governments accidentally tell the truth. The Modi government’s most consequential economic choice has not been one dramatic reform with a memorable acronym. It has been the stubborn decision to keep public investment near the centre of fiscal policy even when subsidies, elections and fashionable demands for instant consumption make that choice politically difficult. The official expenditure profile is not beach reading, but it shows the machinery behind the slogans: asset creation, transfers for capital works and ministry-level allocations that do not fit into a prime-time graphic.
My argument is not that every rupee labelled capital expenditure becomes a gleaming bridge. It does not. Land disputes delay projects, contractors underperform, states sit on approvals and departments sometimes reclassify spending with the creativity of a tax consultant. My argument is narrower and more defensible: India is better served by a government that treats infrastructure as a productive obligation than by an opposition that treats every budget primarily as an opportunity to demand a larger cheque for whichever voting bloc is holding a press conference that afternoon. Congress speaks as if compassion is measured only by immediate transfers. I think compassion also means reducing the time a worker spends on a dangerous road, giving a factory dependable freight access and preventing a small exporter from losing an order because a port connection is inadequate.
The boring choice with a long memory
Public capital has a different political clock from a cash handout. A transfer reaches an account quickly and creates a clear beneficiary. A railway corridor may take years, irritate landowners, produce ugly construction dust and reward a future government with the ribbon-cutting photograph. That is why maintaining an investment push requires more discipline than announcing one. The relevant comparison is not between infrastructure and welfare, as though a civilised state must choose one. It is between welfare supported by an expanding productive base and welfare financed by permanently squeezing tomorrow. Narendra Modi’s government deserves credit for understanding that distinction more consistently than its critics acknowledge. The road, logistics, rail and digital layers built over time are not substitutes for private enterprise; they make private risk less foolish.
The fashionable rebuttal is that capital spending does not guarantee jobs. Of course it does not. A budget is not a divine command to employers. A poorly selected expressway can become a monument to traffic forecasts, and an urban project can raise nearby land values without improving ordinary commutes. But the proper response is to improve appraisal and execution, not to pretend that consumption alone can generate durable prosperity. The government’s own documents allow citizens to inspect allocations and compare budget estimates with revised estimates. I wish more opposition leaders performed that work. Instead, we often receive the old Congress-era morality play in which the state’s virtue is proved by announcing an entitlement while implementation, leakage and financing are treated as impolite follow-up questions.
What the government still gets wrong
I am sympathetic to the direction, not hypnotised by the branding. Delhi still celebrates sanctioned outlays as though sanction were completion. Ministries publish cumulative kilometres and project counts without always making maintenance quality easy to judge. Municipal infrastructure remains the weakest link because cities have limited fiscal autonomy, uneven professional capacity and mayors who are frequently less powerful than the bureaucracies around them. A national highway can deliver a car to the edge of a city faster, only for the passenger to lose the saved hour at a flooded junction. If the Centre wants full credit for the infrastructure decade, it must become more demanding about outcomes after the inaugural drone shot.
There is also a legitimate distributional objection. Large projects can impose costs on communities that receive benefits late or indirectly. Compensation may be delayed, rehabilitation can be unimaginative and consultation is sometimes treated as a procedural obstacle. A right-of-centre government should not dismiss property rights merely because acquisition serves a project it likes. In my view, faster execution and fairer compensation are allies. Predictable rules reduce litigation; credible local consultation identifies avoidable design mistakes; transparent milestones expose contractors who are coasting. The BJP’s political strength gives it room to build these institutions. It should use that room instead of assuming electoral endorsement settles every administrative question.
Congress mistakes nostalgia for an economic model
The Congress critique would carry greater force if the party admitted the limits of the governing culture it romanticises. India did build major institutions and infrastructure under Congress governments; denying that would be childish. But the licence-permit instinct, policy paralysis in the later UPA years and an enduring suspicion of profit are not heirlooms worth polishing. Rahul Gandhi’s rhetoric often compresses a vast economy into a morality tale about a few large business houses. Concentration and competition deserve scrutiny, certainly. Yet the answer cannot be to make scale itself suspect. India needs large firms capable of building, exporting and financing, alongside smaller firms that can enter their supply chains without being strangled by compliance or delayed payments.
The better opposition case would ask whether each capital allocation solves a demonstrated bottleneck, whether procurement is genuinely competitive, whether states can maintain what is built and whether independent evaluation changes subsequent funding. Those are hard questions. They require economists, engineers and patient committee work. They do not fit comfortably into a slogan about a “suit-boot” government. When Congress defaults to that language, it grants the BJP an undeserved monopoly on aspiration. Indians can worry about inequality and still want airports, freight corridors, cleaner stations, reliable electricity and expressways. Indeed, poorer citizens pay the highest price for bad public systems because they cannot buy private alternatives.
The balance sheet must remain honest
None of this releases the government from fiscal arithmetic. Borrowing for a productive asset can be justified more readily than borrowing for routine expenditure, but debt remains debt. Projects need realistic demand assumptions, and off-budget liabilities should not be hidden in public enterprises. The Finance Minister’s budget speech supplies the political narrative; the supporting statements reveal whether that narrative is affordable. I want the government to keep narrowing the fiscal deficit while protecting high-quality investment, even when ministries lobby for decorative schemes. That means pruning weak programmes, charging sensible user fees where people can afford them and giving states incentives to reform utilities rather than repeatedly rescuing them.
Critics sometimes describe this as spreadsheet government, as though seriousness about accounts were emotionally deficient. I find the opposite. Inflation, unreliable services and fiscal crises are brutally emotional experiences for families with no cushion. Sound public finance is not a technocratic ornament; it is protection against political vanity. The Modi government has not achieved some spotless fiscal ideal, especially after the unavoidable shock of the pandemic, but it has made a persuasive case that visible welfare and long-term investment can coexist. Direct benefit transfers, basic services and infrastructure are parts of one state-capacity project, not rival ideologies.
Judge the concrete, then inspect the cracks
I would like Parliament to spend far more time on post-project audits and far less on choreographed adjournments. MPs should compare promised completion dates with actual ones, question cost escalation and publish constituency-level maintenance failures. A pro-growth editorial position should demand this because public investment wins legitimacy through usefulness, not through loyalty. The government’s supporters do it no favour when they treat every query about a contract or delay as hostility to development. Nor do its opponents help when they imply that any partnership with private capital is evidence of capture. Both habits replace analysis with tribal comfort.
My verdict is therefore favourable but conditional. The sustained emphasis on infrastructure is one of the Modi era’s strongest reforms precisely because it is cumulative, unromantic and difficult to reverse. Its benefits appear in travel times, logistics options, construction ecosystems and the confidence to locate production beyond a few established enclaves. Its failures appear in delayed links, poor urban integration and assets built without maintenance plans. I can hold both thoughts without pretending they cancel each other.
The government should take the credit it has earned, then resist becoming intoxicated by its own progress videos. Congress should retire the fantasy that louder promises of redistribution constitute an economic strategy. India’s central budget question is not whether the state should spend. It is whether today’s spending enlarges tomorrow’s choices. On that test, productive capital deserves priority, transparent scrutiny and a defence much less embarrassed than the one it usually receives.
