Monday Musing: The Death of the Budget Speech
By Tushar Panchal*
When Nirmala Sitharaman Made History, Nobody Noticed
On February 1, 2026, Nirmala Sitharaman presented her ninth consecutive Union Budget. No Finance Minister in India’s history has delivered nine straight Budgets under a single Prime Minister. Morarji Desai presented ten, but across two separate tenures spanning a decade. Sitharaman’s unbroken run since 2019 is unprecedented.
It should have been a moment. It was barely a footnote.
Within 24 hours, the national conversation had moved to the India-US trade deal. Within 48 hours, it moved to Rahul Gandhi’s jujitsu speech and the Epstein files. Within 72 hours, Nishikant Dubey was filing motions to cancel Rahul’s membership, farmers were burning effigies in Punjab, and a nationwide strike was underway. By the time Sitharaman stood up to deliver her reply to the Budget debate on February 11, the Budget itself had become a footnote in its own session.
Rs 12.2 lakh crore in capital expenditure. Seven high-speed rail corridors. Semiconductor Mission 2.0 at Rs 40,000 crore. Biopharma SHAKTI at Rs 10,000 crore. A new Income Tax Act, effective from April 2026. Defence allocation raised to Rs 7.85 lakh crore. The highest-ever railway capital allocation at Rs 2.77 lakh crore.
In a previous era, any single one of these would have dominated headlines for weeks. Together, they could not hold the nation’s attention for a weekend.
The Budget is dead. Not as an economic instrument. It still allocates trillions and shapes policy. It is dead as a communication product. And nobody in the government appears to have noticed.
When the Budget Was King
To understand what has been lost, you need to remember what the Budget once was.
There was a time when the Union Budget was the single most important annual event in Indian public life. Markets halted. Offices emptied. Families gathered around televisions. The Finance Minister’s speech was dissected word by word, not just by economists and analysts, but by ordinary citizens trying to understand what would cost more, what would cost less, and what it all meant for their lives.
The Budget set the national narrative for months. Manmohan Singh’s 1991 Budget did not just liberalise the economy; it gave India a new vocabulary. Words like “reforms” and “liberalisation” entered common conversation because of a Budget speech. P. Chidambaram’s “Dream Budget” of 1997 remains cited nearly three decades later. Pranab Mukherjee’s Budgets shaped how the country talked about welfare, subsidies, and fiscal responsibility.
These were not policy documents read out loud. They were communication events. The Finance Minister was, for one day, the most important storyteller in the country. The Budget speech was the frame through which India understood its economic future.
That era is over.
What Killed the Budget
It was not one thing. It was a confluence of three forces, each sufficient to wound the Budget, together sufficient to bury it.
The first is the information environment. When Manmohan Singh presented his Budget in 1991, the news cycle was 24 hours long. Television had one channel that mattered. Newspapers had until the next morning to digest and explain. The Budget lived in a slow-moving information ecosystem that gave it room to breathe, to be discussed, to settle into public consciousness.
In 2026, the Budget competes with social media, WhatsApp forwards, 280-character reactions, and an opposition that has learned to counter-programme in real time. Rahul Gandhi did not wait for the Budget debate to attack the government. He used the Budget session to launch an entirely different conversation about the trade deal. The Budget was the occasion. It was not the event.
The second is the government’s own communication strategy. The Narendra Modi-led government pioneered the practice of pre-Budget announcements: leaking key proposals days before the speech to manage expectations and generate favourable coverage. The logic was sound. Control the narrative by releasing information on your terms. But the unintended consequence was devastating. By the time Sitharaman stood up to speak, the surprises were gone. The major tax changes, the infrastructure commitments, the defence allocations, much of it had been signalled, briefed, or outright announced in advance. A Budget with no surprises is a Budget with no news value. And in the attention economy, no news value means no attention.
The third is that the opposition learned to hijack the frame. This is the most significant change, and it connects directly to Rahul Gandhi’s communication evolution. The old opposition would dutifully respond to the Budget on the government’s terms. “Not enough for farmers.” “Ignores the middle class.” “Fiscal deficit too high.” These are legitimate critiques, but they accept the Budget as the frame. They keep the Budget at the centre of the conversation.
Rahul did something different. He used the Budget session to talk about something else entirely. The trade deal became the story. The Budget became the backdrop. This is a technique the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) perfected against the Congress for years – ignore the opponent’s frame, impose your own. The fact that it is now being used against them, and that they appear to have no counter for it, tells you something about how the competitive landscape of Indian political communication is shifting.
The Rs 583,000 Crore Problem
Here is a number that should alarm the government’s communication strategists.
The total expenditure proposed in the 2026-27 Budget is approximately Rs 53.5 lakh crore. This is not a small Budget. This is not a status quo Budget. It includes significant increases in capital expenditure, defence, railways, semiconductors, biopharma, and education. It introduces a new Income Tax Act. It proposes seven high-speed rail corridors.
This Budget generated less sustained national conversation than a single 45-minute speech by the Leader of the Opposition.
The government’s most important annual policy document, the product of months of preparation by thousands of officials, presented by the longest-serving consecutive Finance Minister in Indian history, was overshadowed by one man standing up in the same Parliament and talking about something else.
This is not a failure of the Budget. It is a failure of the Budget as communication.
What Went Wrong
The Budget speech itself has become part of the problem. Sitharaman holds the record for the longest Budget speech in history: two hours and 40 minutes in 2020, so long she had to stop with two pages remaining. Length is not a communication strategy. It is the absence of one.
A Budget speech that tries to cover everything communicates nothing. When you announce Semiconductor Mission 2.0, Biopharma SHAKTI, seven rail corridors, a new tax act, defence modernisation, education reform, tourism infrastructure, and Corporate Mitras all in the same breath, you are not setting an agenda. You are reading a catalogue.
Compare this with the Budget speeches that actually changed how India thought about itself. Manmohan Singh’s 1991 speech had a single, unmistakable theme: India is opening up. Everything in that speech served that theme. The tariff reductions, the industrial delicensing, and the foreign investment reforms. They were not a list. They were a narrative. You walked away knowing exactly what the Budget was about.
What is the 2026 Budget about? Yuva Shakti? Three Kartavyas? Viksit Bharat 2047? These are slogans, not stories. They do not tell citizens what has changed, what will change, or why it matters to their lives. They are packaging without a product inside.
The government has confused comprehensiveness with communication. A Budget that announces everything is a Budget that communicates nothing.
What Would Save the Budget
If I were advising the Finance Minister on the Budget as a communication product, not as an economic document, I would suggest three things.
First, kill the comprehensive speech. Pick three announcements. Three. Make them significant, make them clear, and make them the entire story. Let the remaining announcements live in the Budget documents for journalists and analysts to discover. The speech should be 30 minutes, not three hours. It should leave the nation talking about three things, not struggling to remember any.
Second, create a Budget moment. The Budget used to have one: the single announcement that everyone remembers. Singh’s liberalisation. Chidambaram’s tax reforms. Jaswant Singh’s fiscal surprise. The 2026 Budget has no moment that it really owns. Seven high-speed rail corridors are a genuinely significant announcement. But it was buried in a speech alongside 40 other announcements of varying weight. If the Finance Minister had walked up, announced seven high-speed rail corridors connecting every major Indian city, shown a map, given a timeline, and sat down, it would have been the only story for a week.
Third, defend the frame. The government knew the opposition would attack the trade deal during the Budget session. It knew the Epstein story was building. It knew farmers were planning protests. And yet it treated the Budget as though it existed in a vacuum, as though the sheer weight of Rs 53.5 lakh crore in spending would command attention by itself. It will not. Not anymore. The Budget needs a communication war room, not just a printing press.
The Deeper Problem
The decline in the Budget speech is a symptom of a larger phenomenon. The government’s communication architecture was built for a different era. It was built for a world where the BJP set every agenda, where the opposition was perpetually reactive, and where the Prime Minister’s voice was the only one that cut through the noise.
That world is shifting. Not because the BJP has become weaker, but because the information environment has become more competitive. The opposition is learning to counter-programme. Social media fragments attention. International events intrude without warning. And the government’s response has been to do more of what it has always done: more announcements, more schemes, more slogans, more events.
More is not the answer. In the attention economy, more is the problem.
The Budget was once a moment when the nation stopped and listened to its government. That moment has not been taken away by the opposition or by social media. It has been surrendered, gradually and without resistance, by a government that confused the act of announcing with the art of communicating.
Sitharaman made history. She deserved a stage that matched it. Instead, she got a session that forgot her before she finished speaking.
*Tushar Panchal is Founder and CEO of WarRoom Strategies, a political and government communication consultancy. He has been advising Chief Ministers, Political Leaders, and Governments across India.
