The ritual ‘halwa ceremony’ heralded the printing of Budget 2017-18 documents on Thursday, but if last year’s experience repeats itself, the government’s strategy to produce the voluminous books could go sour on pricing.
In a bid to go green and cut costs, the print run for Union Budget 2016-17 was slashed by 60%, from 5,100 copies of the 2015-16 level, to just 2,047. But the printing cost for each set of the Budget and its accompanying explanatory documents more than doubled, while printed copies were sold in the Lok Sabha counter at a heavily subsidised price.
The cost of printing a Budget set stood at ₹3,450 last year, but the Centre sold each of them at the Lok Sabha counter for less than half, at ₹1,500. By contrast, in the four preceding years, Budget sets were sold at cost, ranging between ₹835 and ₹1,330, according to replies from the Finance Ministry to The Hindu under the Right to Information (RTI) Act. The Standing Committee on Finance in 2014-15 had asked the Finance Ministry to set up an expert group to “make the whole Budget exercise cost-effective, environment and people-friendly.” The Finance Ministry said in a response to The Hindu ’s RTI requests, that “the number of Budget sets is being reduced gradually on the recommendations of the Standing Committee on Finance.”
Cost doubles
The RTI responses show that Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had approved a plan to reduce the number of Budget sets to be printed in 2015-16 by 35%. However, despite a reduction in 2016-17, the printing cost more than doubled, from ₹1,300 per set in 2015-16 to ₹3,450 in 2016-17.
Moreover, even though the number of 2016-17 Budget copies were sharply lower than in previous years, the total printing cost went up by 4%. The cost of printing rose to ₹70.62 lakh in 2016-17, against ₹67.83 lakh in 2015-16, (the latter was a 28% decline over the year before). Yet, the “competent authority” decided to sell the copies at a subsidised price.
