The Union Budget 2026–27, presented by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman as a roadmap to “Viksit Bharat 2047” and youth-driven growth, projects ₹53.5 lakh crore in total expenditure and a fiscal deficit of 4.3% of GDP, signalling fiscal prudence and macroeconomic stability. Yet beneath these headline figures lies a stark contradiction: the lived realities of ordinary Indians, the working poor, unemployed youth, and those dependent on public services, remain marginal to its core priorities.
Social sector spending, which includes health, education, rural development, and welfare, has fallen to its lowest share of GDP in a decade, dipping even below 2014–15 levels. Key transformative programmes are not only underfunded but also significantly underspent, revealing a troubling gap between allocation and implementation. The Jal Jeevan Mission, allocated ₹67,000 crore in one year, saw actual spending fall to around ₹17,000 crore; a disparity that translates into millions of households still waiting for safe water and basic sanitation. Similar patterns of under-utilisation extend across housing, rural livelihoods, and minority welfare schemes, with some ministries reporting severe shortfalls between promised and actual expenditure.
Unemployment, particularly among India’s expanding youth population, receives no credible structural response in the Budget. Despite repeated rhetoric around “youth empowerment,” there is no clear pathway to generate large-scale, decent employment. The emphasis remains on capital-intensive infrastructure and growth models that historically create fewer jobs per rupee spent, while informal and precarious workers- gig workers, casual labourers, artisans, and migrant workers; are left without meaningful guarantees of job security, fair wages, or social protection. The subsuming of MGNREGA under a new programme, VB-GRAMG, further clouds the assurance of guaranteed rural employment, raising concerns about coverage and implementation.
Education continues to be neglected, with spending far below the long-standing 6% of GDP target envisioned in national policy. While selective initiatives such as creator labs for animation and graphics are announced, these appear as boutique interventions rather than systemic investments in teachers, infrastructure, inclusive quality teaching, and equitable learning outcomes. The foundational requirements of public education, which could enable genuine social mobility, remain inadequately addressed.
Healthcare spending remains at roughly 2% of GDP in central allocations, despite persistent gaps in infrastructure, staffing, and primary care delivery. Announcements of emergency care centres and regional hubs read well in policy documents but fall short of addressing everyday health needs without broader systemic strengthening. Housing schemes such as PMAY- Urban and PMAY-Rural face reduced allocations even as homelessness and rural housing deficits endure.
Across sectors, a consistent pattern emerges: ambitious rhetoric accompanied by constrained substantive support. Fiscal consolidation, including a deficit target of 4.3% and modest debt reduction, is achieved largely through limiting discretionary social expenditure. Meanwhile, interest payments consume nearly a quarter of total expenditure and about 40% of revenue receipts, narrowing the fiscal space for human development.
Ultimately, the Union Budget 2026–27 reflects discipline in arithmetic but not in social responsibility. While the increasing wealth accumulation at one pole may signal growth, the microeconomic realities of millions, without secure employment, quality education, affordable healthcare, safe housing, and reliable public services, remain sidelined. The measure of a budget lies not merely in its spreadsheets, but in the lives it transforms. On that count, this Budget falls short of its promise of equitable progress.
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India’s AI boom is powered by the underpaid labour of vulnerable rural women in India, employed as data annotators and content moderators for global tech companies, watching hundreds of violent, abusive and explicit videos daily to train AI systems. Many experience trauma, insomnia and emotional numbness from prolonged exposure, with one worker saying that after months of the job “you feel blank.” Mostly Dalits and Adivasis, these women earn modest pay while receiving no psychological support, and their essential role remains largely invisible. On one hand this shows the exploitative nature of big tech, on the other hand it exposes the lack of dignified employment available to scores of youth across India. In the recent AI summit at New Delhi, tech giants pledged billions in investments in India’s AI sector, with companies like Reliance and Adani committing large-scale funding and Microsoft planning significant global-south AI spending. New data-centre projects and AI infrastructure deals were also discussed notwithstanding the environmental impact.
