Paperless Budget

Decision to reduce printing of documents is welcome

The Union government has announced that this year onwards it is discontinuing the practice of providing printed copies of the annual Economic Survey and the Budget to the media and the public. As such, only the 788 members of Parliament will receive copies of these documents. The trigger for the government is its attempt to go green and, to that extent, it is a welcome move. At one level, it is true that both the Economic Survey as well as the Budget are fairly technical documents and experts can easily access them from the government website for analysis. In fact, over the past few years, Parliament has been reducing the print run of all documents, including committee reports and the plethora of questions and answers. 

The latest decision is in line with a recommendation of a Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance, which in 2014-15 asked the government to print fewer copies of the Economic Survey and the Budget. Consequently, during the Budget cycle, the government reduced the print run by 60 per cent, from 5,100 copies in 2015-16 to just 2,047 copies in 2016-17. This cut was achieved by limiting the allocation of Budget copies to just three per media house, as against the common practice of providing a copy to every accredited journalist. Also, unlike in the past, when institutions and corporates could buy a copy of the Budget, albeit at a subsidised price, this year there is no such provision.

The Narendra Modi-led government has in its tenure tried to focus on several green initiatives. For instance, in Budget 2015-16, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, while asserting the government’s commitment to make India’s “development process as green as possible”, launched the scheme for Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of Electric Vehicles (FAME) and set ambitious targets for renewable energy — solar, wind, biomass and small hydroelectric — capacity creation. India's de facto carbon tax on most petroleum products also compares favourably with international norms. 

However, it is not difficult to see why critics may object to this move. For one, it sounds gimmicky. For instance, according to reports, the government used to spend Rs 3,450 on printing a copy of the Budget and it was sold, until last year, at Rs 1,500. Eventually, the total cost of printing the Budget documents was only Rs 70.62 lakh. As such, it is not the case that this move will lead to huge savings. Moreover, some might argue that instead of stopping printing, the government could have linked the printing of Budget documents to sustainable agro-forestry. The argument being that trees are not immortal after all and it is better to focus on finding sustainable solutions than resorting to superficial curbs on consumption. 

An allied concern could be about the choice of documents itself — the Economic Survey and the Union Budget are two of the most critical documents that help the larger public understand and gauge the government's functioning and efficiency. Curbing the print version is likely to inhibit dissemination. This argument is all the more relevant in a country like India where only a small minority of people has access to the Internet. 

According to the WWF’s Living Planet report (2014), even though India ranks a lowly 136th among all countries when it comes to per capita ecological footprint, yet when multiplied by the population it ranks the third largest in the world, next only to China and the US. It is reasonable to assume that a large part of this ecological footprint is due to the activities of the Indian government. For instance, one argument is that if the government truly wanted to score high on being “green”, then instead of discontinuing the printing of Budget documents, it could shift to a paperless way of functioning. 

However, regardless of such concerns, the government should be given credit for making a start. A less obvious benefit of the government move towards a more digital record-keeping is that, in time, it will likely bring down the barriers to the implementation on the right to information front.