A new study by the Economic Advisory Council to the PM (EACPM) showed that while stronger economic growth is associated with a more positive Budget narrative, Budget speeches are better understood as a record of how governments diagnose challenges, justify policy choices and articulate national ambition than as predictors of future growth.
In a first-of-its-kind study, the EACPM paper by EACPM part-time member and SBI chief economist Soumya Kanti Ghosh and SBI economist Shashidharan Sharma, traced India’s changing economic priorities by analysing 99 Union Budget speeches delivered between 1947–48 and 2026–27.
The paper using econometric analysis finds that each one-percentage-point increase in inherited real GDP growth is associated with a 0.057-standard-deviation increase in Budget tone.
Titled Union Budget Speeches as India’s Economic Narrative, 1950–2026: From Planning to Viksit Bharat, the paper combined a transparent dictionary-based analysis of Budget speeches with official macroeconomic data and an institutional chronology to examine how India’s development narrative has evolved over nearly eight decades. It used NLP and AI based analysis and uses it extensively.
The evidence points to a clear shift—from the language of planning, public investment and resource mobilisation in the early decades to an increasing emphasis on public capital expenditure, digital public infrastructure, domestic manufacturing, implementation, accountability and strategic national vision in recent years, it said.
One of its most striking findings is that the tone of Budget speeches has become steadily more confident over time. The study finds that the mean net Budget tone rose from -0.04 during 1950–64 to 0.65 in the post-2014 period, while stronger economic growth is consistently associated with a more positive Budget narrative. Importantly, the authors caution that this does not mean Budget speeches predict future growth. Instead, they argue that “the speech works principally as diagnosis, justification, and agenda setting rather than as a short-horizon forecast.”
Every Finance Minister inherits an economy shaped by earlier reforms, crises and institutional choices. The Budget speech explains what the government sees as the key constraints, why it believes certain policy instruments will work, and how it intends to move the economy from present challenges to future growth.
Read individually, these speeches may appear ceremonial. Read together, they become what the paper calls “a contemporaneous history of how the Indian state has understood development,” it noted.
The Budgets of the 1950s and early 1960s reflected an economy defined by scarcity. Planning, public investment, resource mobilisation and foreign-exchange conservation dominated official thinking. The control-oriented language of later decades mirrored wars, droughts, oil shocks and recurring balance-of-payments pressures.
The 1980s introduced the vocabulary of modernization, while the 1991 crisis fundamentally changed the narrative. Budget speeches increasingly spoke of stabilization, devaluation, delicensing, trade liberalisation and greater private participation. Between 1996 and 2004, reforms became institutional rather than episodic, with repeated emphasis on highways, telecommunications, fiscal rules, banking reforms and competition policy.
The decade after 2004 combined high growth with rights-based welfare and financial inclusion. But following the global financial crisis, the language increasingly reflected inflation, stalled projects and implementation bottlenecks. As the paper notes, the official record showed “a widening gap between stated investment priorities and the capacity to move projects through approval and implementation.”
Since 2014, the narrative has shifted again. Budget speeches increasingly revolve around public capital expenditure, digital public infrastructure, domestic manufacturing, implementation, accountability and the long-term ambition of Viksit Bharat. The language of strategic national vision has reached its highest level in the dataset, while implementation and accountability receive greater emphasis than in any previous period.
TOPICSbudgetThis article was first uploaded on August seven, twenty twenty-six, at forty-one minutes past six in the evening. © The Indian Express (P) Ltd