The citizenry of India is too patient and undemanding of its leaders. True, when they commit egregious crimes and brazen acts of impropriety, the public is not averse to voting them out of office. Yet everyday acts of omission and commission and particularly dereliction of the duty of accountability for revenue mobilised through taxation, and expended from the public exchequer, is easily forgotten and forgiven. The validity of this observation was confirmed when Union finance minister Pranab Mukherjee presented the third budget of the Congress-led UPA-II government to Parliament and the people on March 16. Although perhaps in no country is the annual budget exercise of the Central government marked by as much hype, and media coverage as in India, paradoxically none of the economic pundits who dominate television news channels and the print media on B-day understands the Union budget sufficiently to provide a coherent account of the taxation strategy and expenditure priorities of the Union government. At best the post-budget analyses of ace economists are akin to those of the seven blind men of Hindustan describing parts of an elephant by touch and surmising the full form and shape of the beast. This confusion is the outcome of the archaic presentation style and format of the budget which leaves the public (including your editor who edited India’s first two business magazines) at best minimally wiser about the tax-and-spend priorities of the Union government. The fault is not in us but in the deliberate opacity and lack of accountability of the Union finance minister and bureaucrats of North Block, New Delhi. For instance, it’s well known that one of the biggest expenditure heads of the Central government is the annual wages, salaries and pensions of the estimated 4 million ministers, bureaucrats and staff on its payroll. Yet this massive annual expenditure estimated at Rs.150,000 crore is not disclosed separately in the Union budget. Curiously, the opacity of the Union budget is in sharp contrast to the high degree of transparency demanded from business enterprises by the Companies Act, 1956 and the department of company law and affairs. In their annual reports, corporates are obliged by law to declare the company’s wage bill (including the names, educational qualifications, experience and designations of all employees earning more than Rs.24 lakh per year), details of physical output and value thereof, together with a plethora of other information. Likewise, the citizenry which is expected to contribute a massive Rs.1077,612 crore to the Central treasury by way of direct and indirect taxes in 2012-13, is entitled to an itemised account under all major heads detailing how the money was spent last year and to what effect in terms of outcomes and assets creation, and how it is proposed to be spent in the current year with predicted outcomes. Meanwhile academic and media pundits would do well to admit that there’s a strong element of the emperor’s clothes hysteria about the annual Union budget presentation rite. It needs to be exposed as a massively fraudulent…
