It's that time of the Budget season when most of the real tax and accounting work has been done, and the gnomes in the finance ministry are getting down to the details of what to put into the finance minister's speech.
Jaswant Singh may or may not make significant departures with regard to the content of the Budget, but he would be well advised to do some things about the speech -- and not just because media attention has grown over the years.
To start with, the speech should be radically shortened. Over the past decade, what used to be an hour-long peroration has lengthened to an hour and three-quarters, when in fact the speech should be as brief as half an hour.
That's not difficult to achieve if a second thing is also done: keep the focus of the speech tightly on the Budget itself, and the financial numbers, leaving non-financial policy issues for other occasions.
To do this, the finance minister should suggest to the Prime Minister a third course of action, which is to get the government to spell out not just its legislative programme but also any significant economic policy changes that it proposes, in the President's address to Parliament at the start of the Budget session.
This is for the all-important reason that the Budget is prepared in secret. Other than the finance minister's immediate circle of civil servants, only the Prime Minister gets to know in advance as to what is being cooked up.
The Cabinet gets a nominal look-in, minutes before the presentation to Parliament, but this is strictly a formality since nothing can be changed at that stage.
How incorrect this procedure it becomes obvious when you are dealing with sensitive issues like (say) labour policy, on which Cabinet members will legitimately have their own views -- and this is precisely the reason why the labour law changes that Yashwant Sinha announced two years ago have yet to see the light of day.
The President's speech, in contrast with the Budget speech, is discussed in full by the Cabinet and therefore represents more faithfully the collective government view.
The Budget acquired a heavy policy agenda only with Manmohan Singh, but that was in special circumstances, because the reforms were being kicked off with the 1991 Budget and each successive exercise took the reforms process forward.
Today's situation is more 'normal', and the Budget should rightly stick to its basic task of dealing with fiscal matters. In addition, the finance minister should spend a few minutes explaining why the old year's numbers have panned out differently from what was initially proposed, and why he thinks the new year's numbers will not meet the same fate.
This will have the entirely beneficial result of making finance ministers feel more accountable for delivering what is promised.
That, after all, is the purpose of the whole exercise.
