Why grand policy statements in this 'never-before' like Budget are unlikely

The annual budgets have never been occasions for Prime Minister Narendra Modi to make grand economic policy statements. The eight presented by three finance ministers since FY14, Arun Jaitley, Piyush Goyal and Nirmala Sitharaman have not therefore been the templates to set the directions for government policies in each year.
 

Jan Dhan Yojana, Ayushman Bharat, or Prime Minister’s Awas Yojana were not first set out in the budgets. Public sector bank mergers, demonetisation, GST or even the mega slashing of corporate tax rates have all happened outside the budget speech. The budgets for each year simply incorporated these announcements into their framework and set out the financial implications. Winding up of the erstwhile Planning Commission…the list goes on and on.
 

Against all this there is only one slim piece of evidence going the other way. In a CII event last year, Sitharaman said this time she shall offer a "never before" like budget. For all the avalanche of expectations riding on this budget, this is a sobering thought. Prime Minister Modi is not in the habit of setting out his economic policies through budget speeches. He prefers the budget to make a statement on the fiscal arithmetic fine tuning tax regulations and defraying expenditure on the government’s stated priorities.
 

Also do remember, the finance minister has presented at least four set of policy announcements since her last budget of 2020. Modi himself has termed these as mini-budgets. So taking the sequence forward this shall be the fifth in the series. That by itself is a record and shall certainly be something to add to the list of significant events for the year. She has already spanned reforms in agriculture, labour, MSME and to certain extent brought in changes in the regulatory spheres in these mini-budgets.

READ MORE: Budget to be seen as part of mini budgets of 2020, says PM Narendra Modi
 

2020 does set the backdrop for the finance minister to attempt something dramatic. But then an inspection of the degrees of freedom available to her shows the expectations have to be necessarily sober. The money available to make a grand statement is just not there. She can, for instance, announce that steps have been completed for India to join the global debt indices or put out plans to spend more on infrastructure. There is also room to a certain extent for announcement of new policies. But it shall be remarkable if she has the space to announce farmers shall get more money in the PM Kisan Samman Nidhi instead. For those Modi would rather prefer other options in the rest of the year to set out those policies. Not in a budget speech, certainly.