A Budget for a Brutal, Hostile World

 This Budget Is Not Here to Please You. It Is Here to Correct You.

Anyone hunting for a catchy headline in Nirmala Sitharaman’s ninth Budget has already misunderstood it. There is none because this Budget is not playing to the gallery. It is not begging for approval from markets, media panels, or WhatsApp economists. It is doing something far more unfashionable: it is telling the country to grow up.

This is not an annual budget. It is not even a political budget. It is a strategic document for a country that can no longer pretend the world is benign, rules-based, or fair.

Most criticism of the Budget collapses at the first step because it uses mental tools that belong to another era. We still ask: what did I get this year? What tax relief was announced? What subsidy expanded? These are the questions of a complacent economy that believes tomorrow will resemble yesterday.

It will not.

The world has changed — brutally and irreversibly. Trade is weaponised. Finance is coercive. Allies behave like extortionists when it suits them. And India has learned, rather late but decisively, that sovereignty without economic depth is an illusion.

This reality is laid out with unusual honesty in the Economic Survey’s preface by the Chief Economic Adviser. It is not comforting. It does not flatter. It admits vulnerability. It admits that India punches below its weight. It admits that a small external shock can still cause disproportionate damage. But it also explains why India did not collapse when it was supposed to.

That resilience did not fall from the sky. It came from a decade of grinding repair work after an economy was left wrecked — banks hollowed out, balance sheets poisoned, policy credibility destroyed. Five years were spent cleaning up the mess. Then came COVID. Then came wars, sanctions, and supply-chain chaos that exposed how fragile “globalisation” really was.

Only after surviving this does a country earn the right to think long-term.

This Budget marks that turn.

And it does something Indian budgets rarely do: it tells the private sector some uncomfortable truths.

Corporate India is not short of money. It is short of nerve. It sits on mountains of idle cash and unused credit while lecturing the government about investment climate. Risk-taking has been replaced by spreadsheet conservatism. Profits are hoarded. Capacity expansion is postponed. Responsibility is outsourced to the state.

Meanwhile, it is the household sector that has carried the economy on its back — consuming, saving, building homes, educating children, caring for parents — without government hand-holding. In countries that like to lecture India, these functions are propped up by massive state debt. Here, they are sustained by personal effort.

That imbalance is unhealthy. And this Budget, quietly but firmly, signals that the era of indulgence is over.

The priorities chosen tell the story. Digital sovereignty. Data security. Defence capability. Energy resilience. None of these are glamorous. None of them deliver instant applause. But without them, independence becomes a slogan rather than a condition.

This is where the Budget makes its most unfashionable move: it rejects instant gratification.

By invoking the distinction between Shreya and Preya — the enduring good versus fleeting comfort — the Economic Survey delivers a message that many would rather not hear. Growth without discipline is decay postponed. Consumption without capacity is dependence dressed up as prosperity.

Delayed gratification is not cruelty. It is seriousness.

This Budget is not “harsh” or “generous.” Those are childish categories. It is demanding. It demands patience from citizens, discipline from policymakers, and courage from private capital that has grown too comfortable criticising the state while hiding behind it.

To judge this Budget by tax tables is to miss the point entirely. It is not a fiscal document pretending to be strategic. It is a strategy document that refuses to pretend otherwise.

History will not remember what this Budget gave in one year. It will remember whether it helped India become less vulnerable, less blackmailable, and less dependent over the next ten.

The real question is not whether this Budget makes you happy today.

The real question is whether you are willing to be uncomfortable now so that the country is not humiliated later.

That question is not polite. But it is unavoidable.