When it comes to making the Budget, India needs to learn from the UK

The setting up of an OBR-like fiscal council has been thwarted by bureaucrats scared of losing turf and being accountable to the evidence

Reading the UK government’s spring Budget, I was painfully reminded that India’s fiscal policy making is needlessly antiquarian and ineffective. India inherited an administratively focused fiscal management system from the British. Britain has long moved on to an efficient, modern system. India has not. Indian Budgets are non-transparent and crafted with reference more to rhetoric than to evidence; they contain a multitude of irrelevant and bombastic statements that pass for policy pronouncements. Who the finance minister is makes little difference; the individual is quickly overwhelmed by the minutiae and detritus generated by an administratively-oriented and fragmented finance bureaucracy.

The UK