Budget is an estimate of income (or earnings/amount of money earned) and expenditure (amount of money spent) for a set period of time.
India's Union Budget keeps the account of the government's finances for the fiscal year that runs from 1st April to 31st March.
It is announced by India's Finance Minister on February 1st, breaking the earlier practice of announcing it on the last day of February. The finance minister, by convention, makes a speech while introducing the budget.
But wait, do you think it’s just our Finance Minister, Arun Jaitley who has been working on it? Definitely not! Budget making is a complex and time - consuming process that involves many policy makers.
Let’s try to understand the process:
This year, like last year, there will be no separate Rail Budget. Also part B of the budget speech that involves vital tax - related information is expected to be shorter in light of the absence of many indirect taxes having been replaced by Goods and Services Tax (GST). Part A of the budget speech includes the policies, schemes and expenditure plans of the government. The speech that is filled with numbers and percentages is best to understand through statistics and sieved information that is published by almost all newspapers on the following day.
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