# Ajayan | The familiar reassurance “better late than never” no longer applies. In the case of Kerala Finance Minister KN Balagopal’s Budget presented on Thursday, the more honest verdict is better never than late. This is a Budget built on knowing unreality, an elaborate statement of intent offered with full awareness that most proposals will never be implemented.
With the Moral Code of Conduct looming and a new Government to be in place in May, execution is effectively foreclosed even before debate begins. What remains, after nearly five years of policy inertia and mounting public dissatisfaction, is not fiscal resolve but rhetorical excess. The document reads less as a plan of action than as a carefully timed gesture, arriving too late.
For years, those most in need were met with indifference, if not open disdain. ASHA workers and Anganwadi teachers were left to agitate for dignity, while school principals quietly reached into their own pockets to keep mid-day meals running. That neglect makes this sudden flourish of largesse all the more jarring, and understandably suspect.
True to the governing ethos of the past decade, Thursday’s presentation revealed a startlingly bloated Rs1.92-lakh-crore Budget, nearly a quarter larger than last year’s. Much of the speech, however, was devoted to blaming the Centre for a fund-starved State. No pause was offered to address the obvious contradiction: how a near-empty Treasury intends to finance this burst of generosity. The question, it seems, was never meant to be asked.
The promised largesse of Rs 14,500 crore for social security pensions and ASHA and Anganwadi workers honorariums as welfare spending rests on a single wager: the recommendations of the 16th Finance Commission. The hope is that the report will be kind, that allocations will rise. But what if they do not? Why announce windfalls without knowing the yield, why raise expectations and brandish welfare as a poll campaign theatre? These are questions the government prefers remain unasked. If funds arrive only in trickles, the script is already written; the Centre will again be accused of throttling the State.
But the electorate has been less forgiving of late. After the verdicts delivered in the last Lok Sabha and local body elections, amid growing unease over corruption, sloth, indifference and arrogance - the enduring signatures of this regime - the Budget speech carried the cadence of a swan song. Voters can choose not to err. With empty coffers and a hefty ledger of unkept promises, the departing government can still claim noble intent, and let failure be reassigned elsewhere.
Numbers, unlike speeches, do not perform. They expose the widening chasm between promise and reality. Total revenue receipts barely moved from Rs 1,24,486 crore in 2023–24 to Rs 1,24,861 crore in 2024–25, a negligible 0.3 per cent rise. Own tax revenue grew by 3.1 per cent, even as the Finance Minister projects a jump of over 12 per cent next year. Non-tax revenue managed an anemic 0.9 per cent increase.
The most telling figure is the revenue deficit, 3.78 per cent of GSDP, signifying that the State continues to spend well beyond what it earns. This stands in stark defiance of the very Finance Commission the government invokes for salvation, which prescribes not a deficit but a revenue surplus of 2.5 per cent. The arithmetic, in the end, refuses to share the optimism of the speech.
KIIFB is repeatedly invoked as a talisman of development, yet its imprint remains largely invisible. What is instead paraded as big-ticket projects are Central ones like the national highways (crumbling notwithstanding) and the Adani-promoted Vizhinjam port. The State’s own flagship, K-Rail, was derailed at the level of conception itself. Now, with another grand proposal being floated, Kerala appears ready to board yet another elusive dream
Even as the government clings to claims of a numero uno status, its meaning made unclear, the more stubborn reality is a slowing growth rate that continues to trail the national average. With elections looming, these fresh assurances are unlikely to mature into outcomes. When a decade was available, this last-minute rush reads less as urgency than as deception; an election-bound performance betraying not lack of time, but lack of intent and will.
