Beyond numbers

Budget speech should have been fact-checked

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, in her presentation of the Union Budget for 2020-21, sought to restore trust in the Indian government’s numbers. Concern has built up over such matters as the scale of the fiscal deficit, the actual growth performance, and the extent of unemployment. She deserves credit for making elements of extra-budgetary borrowing much clearer, and the government has also set up a committee to examine how its official statistics are produced. This is, in effect, a recognition that the credibility associated with official pronouncements has been undermined, and there is a need to recover it. Such an effort