I have a confession that will disqualify me from several Delhi dinner tables: I enjoy reading Budget documents. Not merely the speech, which is political theatre with numbers attached, but the expenditure profile, receipts, revised estimates and those tables whose typography appears designed to repel citizens. They tell a less melodramatic story than television does. In the official Union Budget 2026-27 documents, one can follow the government’s choices across revenue spending, capital creation, transfers and fiscal management instead of pretending that a single tax announcement constitutes economic policy.
What I see is not a flawless revolution. I see a government that has gradually made durable public investment central to its economic argument, while also moving liabilities and subsidies toward more legible accounts. Those are reforms because they change the state’s machinery, not because they provide an applause line. They are precisely the reforms Congress-era nostalgists rarely discuss. Nostalgia is easier when nobody opens the annexures.
My case for giving the government credit is therefore conditional but firm. Roads, railways, logistics, digital systems and public assets can raise productive capacity in ways that recurring giveaways cannot. Yet capital expenditure is not sacred merely because the spreadsheet calls it capital. A badly selected project can be an expensive monument to optimism. The correct right-of-centre position is not that every rupee spent by a BJP government becomes wise by contact. It is that investment should beat consumption politics, and execution should be measured mercilessly.
The reform hidden beneath the speeches
For decades, Indian fiscal debate rewarded the announcement and forgot the balance sheet. A minister declared a scheme, the press printed the allocation, and everyone moved on before asking whether money was released, used, or parked. The present government did not invent fiscal seriousness, and it has occasionally indulged in its own branding excesses. But its preference for infrastructure-led growth is a recognisable departure from the Congress instinct to treat entitlement design as the summit of economic imagination.
The old model had a political elegance: distribute a benefit, attach a moral claim to it, and portray anyone asking about financing as cruel. Some welfare is indispensable. Food security, basic income support in distress, healthcare and education are not frivolities. My objection is to the assumption that compassion is measured by the quantity of recurring expenditure while a freight corridor, rural road or reliable power connection is somehow cold economics. A functioning asset changes what a family or firm can earn. That is social policy with concrete under it.
The government’s published accounts allow readers to compare budget estimates with revised estimates rather than worship the opening promise. The PRS annual policy review is useful here because it places fiscal choices alongside legislation, regulation and economic conditions. Anyone serious about judging a Budget should look at the distance between intent and delivery. The government deserves credit for choosing productive investment; it deserves no exemption when ministries underspend or projects stall.
This distinction matters because supporters often damage a good argument through exaggeration. They point to an allocation as if a bridge has already appeared. Critics commit the mirror-image error, treating every missed target as proof that the entire investment strategy is fraudulent. I prefer the less exciting discipline of asking four questions: Was the project needed? Was procurement credible? Was construction timely? Did the completed asset improve movement, capacity or service? Capital expenditure is a means, not a devotional object.
Clean books are political reform too
One of the Modi government’s underappreciated improvements has been the effort, uneven but real, to make the Union’s obligations more visible. Earlier governments were fond of financing today’s politics with tomorrow’s accounting. Subsidy burdens could be shifted, liabilities obscured, and the headline deficit protected through devices ordinary readers were not expected to inspect. Congress veterans now speak of technocratic competence as hereditary property, but some of their celebrated budgets relied on precisely this fog.
Transparency does not make the fiscal problem disappear. It makes democratic argument possible. If the state borrows to build an asset that serves citizens for decades, voters can debate the return. If it borrows indirectly to conceal the cost of a current subsidy, voters receive a flattering headline and a future invoice. I know which practice I consider more respectable.
The government must go further. It should publish clearer project-level dashboards connecting allocations, releases, milestones and outcomes. It should make revised estimates politically consequential rather than allow ministries to announce the same ambition repeatedly. It should distinguish maintenance from ribbon-cutting glamour. India has too many new assets whose upkeep becomes an orphan the morning after inauguration.
There is also a federal question. The Centre can create incentives and provide long-term capital support, but states and municipalities often own the last mile. A highway that ends in urban gridlock, a station without sensible access, or a water system without local maintenance cannot be rescued by a triumphant central press release. The BJP governs enough states to demonstrate integrated execution instead of blaming federal complexity. If its model is superior, the proof should be visible where the national project meets the municipal drain.
That is where I occasionally share an opposition concern, though not its theatrical packaging. Centralisation can speed decisions, but it can also suppress inconvenient local information. A chief minister, mayor or panchayat is not automatically wiser than Delhi; neither is Delhi automatically wiser because it has a larger emblem. The government should combine national ambition with local accountability, not confuse command with capacity.
Why the opposition’s alternative is unconvincing
Congress and its allies attack the government from mutually incompatible directions. They accuse it of insufficient welfare, excessive spending, favouring construction, neglecting jobs, and then demand larger unfunded transfers that would leave less fiscal room for investment. This is not a programme. It is a complaint buffet.
The recurring Congress promise is that another guarantee, caste-calibrated transfer or centrally named right will solve the structural weakness of incomes. Such policies can sometimes relieve genuine distress. They cannot substitute for logistics, electricity, urban reform, industrial capacity, skills and competitive firms. Redistribution without sufficient production eventually becomes a quarrel over scarcity. The Congress-era habit was to moralise the quarrel and call that governance.
The left’s critique is clearer but worse. It distrusts private profit, regards state spending as virtuous when attached to consumption and suspicious when it enables markets, and treats fiscal restraint as an imported ideology. Yet the same citizens allegedly protected by this worldview pay the inflation tax, endure poor services and lose opportunities when investment collapses. There is nothing progressive about defending a state that spends heavily but builds badly.
Still, the government should resist easy triumphalism. Public investment can crowd in private capital only when businesses believe rules will remain predictable, contracts will be honoured and demand will endure. Tax administration must become less adversarial. Regulatory changes must arrive with consultation rather than surprise. Small firms require simpler compliance in practice, not merely another portal. A pro-investment Budget paired with bureaucratic friction is a car with one wheel clamped.
Employment is the hardest test. Infrastructure creates direct work and reduces costs, but India needs sustained labour-intensive growth, better apprenticeships and cities capable of absorbing migrants with dignity. The government’s defenders should not wave a flyover at every jobs question. They should show how the flyover connects workers to expanding firms, housing and markets. The opposition is wrong to dismiss capital formation; it is not wrong that citizens judge policy through livelihoods.
The standard I would apply
I would evaluate the next phase by composition, completion and consequence. Composition asks whether expenditure is moving toward assets and essential human capability rather than politically convenient leakage. Completion asks whether projects leave PowerPoint. Consequence asks whether travel time, freight cost, reliability, productivity or access actually improve.
This standard is less emotionally satisfying than declaring either an economic miracle or a national collapse. It also happens to be fair. The Modi government has earned the benefit of the doubt on its broad preference for infrastructure, formalisation and cleaner fiscal presentation. It has not earned blind faith on individual execution. No government should.
What irritates me is the commentariat’s refusal to acknowledge the direction of reform because doing so would complicate its morality play. If Congress had overseen the same sustained emphasis on public capital, many economists now sniffing at “headline capex” would call it a historic supply-side transformation with a human face. The policy does not become less valuable because the wrong party, in their view, implemented it.
Nor should BJP supporters mimic Congress by measuring seriousness through the size of an announcement. The best defence of this government is a completed asset, transparent account and demonstrable return. The worst is a hashtag insisting that scrutiny itself is disloyal.
I will continue reading the dreary tables because that is where governments reveal their hierarchy of priorities. Speeches tell us whom ministers wish to impress. Accounts tell us what the state is attempting to do, what it failed to do and what it cost. On that evidence, the government’s investment-first turn deserves genuine credit. Its next reform should be to make every ministry prove that the concrete, rails and cables purchased with public money produce more than photographs.
