Secrecy around budget should end: Yashwant Sinha

Kolkata, March 3 (IANS) The secrecy surrounding the annual union budget needs to be broken to facilitate better participation both from the industry as well as individuals, senior BJP leader and former finance minister Yashwant Sinha said here on Tuesday.

"The secrecy around the budget needs to be broken... If the secrecy wasn't there, the government would have got more suggestions when formulating the Rs.20,000 crore Mudra Bank," he said at an event organised by the Merchant Chamber of Commerce here.

He said the government is unnecessarily shrouding the budget proposals in secrecy before the presentation of the budget.

"There's nothing on expenditure or income side which calls for secrecy," he said.

The former finance minister who had also headed the external affairs ministry during the NDA 1 rule compared the present scenario with a ship waiting to unload its cargo fearing a tax hike.

"We are living in an age when a ship stays at high seas before the budget announcement to unload its cargo at port awaiting taxation changes," he said.

Sinha said the budget is only a representation of the annual income and expenditure of the government and its projected income for the coming fiscal year where some 'Constitutional Provisions' also entail the finance minister to propose some changes in the government's revenue functionaries.

The former Hazaribagh-elected member of parliament said the major areas of concern are its arithmetic tally to balance revenue and expenditure, scope for growth, livelihood issues of people, the quality of life it brings in and the question of equity to balance geographies, economic classes and gender.

He said the budget size for 2015-16 is Rs.18 lakh crore.