Budget 2023 | Here's how to read the Budget document

The Union Budget will be presented by the country's Finance Minister, Nirmala Sitharaman on February 1. We take a look at how one can read and easily understand the Budget document.

The Budget starts with a speech by the Finance Minister. The speech is the most essential element of the Budget documents, despite the fact that it is only a minor part of them. The speech can be broken down into two halves.

Part A lays forth the finance minister's predictions for the coming fiscal year, as well as the reform strategy.

Budget 2023 | What is Fiscal Policy?

It includes planned schemes and measures for various sectors like agriculture, health, education, small and large businesses, services sector, startups, and so forth. Along with this, the finance minister also announces some Budgeted targets like divestment, fiscal deficit and others.

Part B contains tax announcements, both direct and indirect (excluding GST, which does not come under the purview of the Budget, but instead is decided by the GST Council). Any changes to income tax slabs, corporate tax, capital gains tax, customs and excise levies are announced in this section.

Part B is followed by the annex, which provides a summary of the tax announcements as well as Budgeted spending on various schemes, programmes, and ministries.

The Budget document can be used as a reference tool for the main Budgeted targets for coming financial year, like tax revenue, non-tax revenue, capital expenditure and administrative expenditure of the government, along with items like subsidy outlays for food and fertiliser, revenue transfer to states and UTs, and more.

Every chapter has highlights and executive summaries for convenient reading. You can seek up something called 'Budget at a Glance' if you want to rapidly go over the Budget.

An Annual Financial Statement is a document that contains information about the state of the government's finances.

A number of media organisations use this source of information to pick up the standard infographics.