Budget secrecy isn’t needed for a number of reasons, and doing away with it would actually benefit India’s policymakers.
With just one week having elapsed in the Budget’s ‘quarantine’ or ‘quiet’ period, there’s still ample time for the Narendra Modi government to do away with the last vestige of colonialism associated with the Budget-making process: secrecy. This would be in keeping with the previous Budget-related reforms that the BJP government has already implemented.
The quarantine period starts in December and continues till the Budget is presented on 1 February. During this period, reporters, policy advisory groups and industry bodies are barred from entering the finance ministry. Officials critical to the Budget-making process go into lockdown, many of them spending much of the quarantine period in the ministry, not going home until the Budget is presented.
TCA Sharad Raghavan 