BUDGET 2026: KARTAVYA WITH DEFERRED RESPONSIBILITIES?
Shirin Akhter
The State’s kartavya is not exhausted by balancing books or reassuring markets. It lies in ensuring that health, education, and welfare are seen as obligations rather than generosity.
On the surface, the Budget presents itself as fiscally responsible. As Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman stated, “The Reform Express is well on its way and will maintain its momentum to help us fulfil our kartavya.” The reaffirmation of deficit consolidation, projected at 4.4% of GDP (gross domestic product) in the revised estimates for 2025–26 and 4.3% in the budget estimates for 2026–27 and the emphasis on capital expenditure are presented as necessary instruments of responsible governance, underscoring a commitment to discipline and continuity. Capital expenditure has been raised to ?12.2 lakh crore, once again positioned as a key macroeconomic lever to sustain growth momentum.
Yet, on a closer and critical reading, the Union Budget 2026-27 appears less like a conventional economic document and more like a moral statement. It reflects how the State assigns obligation, who is expected to shoulder responsibility, who is permitted to defer it and in doing so, forces us to ask who ultimately bears the consequences when State protection recedes.
This fiscal strategy rests on a tax trajectory that has not delivered the inclusive fiscal space it promised. Despite rising collections and repeated claims of revenue buoyancy, social spending has not expanded in proportion to need. Adjustment has instead taken place quietly through expenditure compression, particularly in welfare and development.
Public expenditure on health has increased in nominal terms, with allocations nudged to ?1.06 lakh crore, a nearly 10% rise over the previous year’s revised estimates. However, this increase largely reflects inflationary adjustment and baseline expansion rather than a structural shift toward universal public provisioning.
The Finance Minister emphasised that India would continue to move towards Viksit Bharat, “balancing ambition with inclusion.” Stability, continuity, and credibility are repeatedly foregrounded as virtues of governance. In this context, fiscal prudence begins to function as a moral shield. Discipline is celebrated, but the burden of discipline is uneven. While the State speaks the language of restraint—again invoking the need to balance ambition with inclusion—households are left to manage the rising costs of health, education, and care largely on their own.
A close reading of the Budget suggests that the kartavya repeatedly emphasised by the government functions largely as exhortation directed at citizens, calling for compliance, patience, and adjustment while the State’s own obligation to protect remains weakly articulated. This imbalance is reinforced by one of the most consequential shifts in recent budgets: the steady transfer of welfare responsibilities to the States. Often described as cooperative federalism, this process in practice resembles decentralisation without empowerment.
Health, education, nutrition, and social protection are increasingly implemented by states whose fiscal capacity is constrained and whose revenue autonomy remains limited, even as the Centre retains policy control and narrative authority. The risks of delivery failure are thus dispersed downward. Citizens are directed to their state governments; states point to limited resources; and the Centre remains largely insulated from the consequences of everyday failure.
The health announcements in Budget 2026-27 include duty waivers on select cancer and rare-disease drugs, expanded trauma centres, regional hubs for medical value tourism, and plans to train over one lakh allied health professionals. The Finance Minister emphasised strengthening health infrastructure and expanding the workforce across disciplines, including optometry and applied psychology. Yet, gestures are not guarantees. Duty waivers may marginally reduce prices for select drugs, but they do little to address the deeper structure of health insecurity that most families confront: overstretched public hospitals, inadequate primary care, unaffordable diagnostics, and catastrophic out-of-pocket expenditure. Infrastructure announcements, when unaccompanied by assured staffing and sustained operational funding, often remain promises suspended in time.
More revealing is the broader orientation of health policy. The emphasis on biopharma manufacturing and medical value tourism reflects a comfort with markets and a discomfort with universality. Prevention, nutrition, environmental health, and community care continue to occupy the margins. Once again, the State’s kartavya is narrowly defined, with the State acting primarily as a facilitator rather than a guarantor. Responsibility for illness, recovery, and care quietly shifts to households, and within households, most often to women.
Education, too, arrives wrapped in optimism. The Budget places education firmly within the employment conversation, with the Finance Minister proposing an “Education to Employment and Enterprise” Standing Committee to recommend measures for aligning education, skills, and labour-market outcomes, alongside announcements on girls’ hostels in every district, AI-enabled classrooms, and workforce-aligned programmes. These interventions may benefit some, but these do not confront the deeper inequalities that shape who enters, survives, and succeeds within the education system.
Girls’ hostels are undeniably important and can meaningfully ease mobility constraints for women students. However, these cannot serve as substitutes for broader public commitments to affordable fees, adequate scholarships, language support, anti-discrimination measures, and sustained funding of public universities.
Corridor-based university clusters risk drawing resources toward already developed regions, leaving state universities elsewhere to struggle. The reduction in TCS (tax collected on source) on overseas education and medical remittances from 5% to 2% is particularly revealing. It benefits families who already possess the means to send children abroad, while the majority navigating underfunded public institutions at home gain little.
The Finance Minister also spoke of initiatives designed to create “future champions,” particularly in the context of MSMEs (medium, small and micro enterprises) and enterprise growth, further reinforcing an education–employment–enterprise pipeline. Education is thus increasingly framed as an individual project—an investment in employability rather than a universal right. When students are urged to skill themselves without parallel public commitment, kartavya is moralised downward. Education is increasingly privatised, financed through household expenditure, debt, and market-oriented institutions, while aspiration is celebrated and failure is personalised.
Union Budgets are no longer neutral documents. They increasingly signal who is protected and who must cope. Citizens are repeatedly asked to be patient, disciplined, and resilient. But patience becomes coercive when it is demanded endlessly from the same social groups, informal workers, lower-income households, women, and first-generation learners, those with the least capacity to absorb risk. Kartavya, when stripped of reciprocity, becomes a language of endurance rather than justice.
Reclaiming Kartavya as Shared Responsibility
In its current usage, kartavya risks becoming a one-way instruction, from the State to the citizen. Yet, in a constitutional democracy, duty must flow both ways. The State’s kartavya is not exhausted by balancing books or reassuring markets. It lies in ensuring that health is not a matter of luck or income, that education does not become a debt-financed gamble, that welfare is understood as obligation rather than generosity, and that growth serves dignity instead of obscuring deprivation.
Without this reciprocity, kartavya loses its ethical meaning and becomes disciplinary, merely a way of asking citizens to accept what the State no longer fully commits to preventing. Union Budget 2026-27 does not dismantle welfare; it quietly redefines it downward. Responsibility is decentralised, risks are individualised, and moral language demanding that citizens “fulfil our kartavya” is deployed without corresponding material commitment.
If kartavya is to matter, it must begin with those who govern. Otherwise, it becomes a burden placed on citizens, a request to endure, adapt, and adjust to a world where protection is promised but responsibility is postponed. In that sense, Budget 2026-27 reads less like a statement of duty fulfilled and more like a document of responsibility deferred.
The writer is Associate Professor at Zakir Husain Delhi College, University of Delhi. The views are personal.