India's budget buzz, minus the noise

Today’s budget comes wrapped in the usual theatre: breathless TV panels, traders reading tea leaves, and taxpayers hoping for magic. Behind the buzz, though, there's one genuinely grown-up shift, and a shopping list of demands that tells you what different constituencies want from the state. The big idea: a sturdier fiscal compass The government is signalling a move from obsessing over the fiscal deficit (how much extra borrowing it adds this year) to watching the debt-to-GDP ratio (the total pile of past borrowing compared with the economy’s size). Think of it as switching from tracking this year’s credit-card spend to tracking the overall debt burden. On the numbers given, the central government debt is 56.1 per cent of GDP, with an aim to bring it to 50 per cent by 2030. Hitting that target,