Vivek Dehejia, Resident Senior Fellow at IDFC Institute, talks about why this year's budget was symbolic in a sense that the Annual Budget will no longer we a natural vehicle for announcements of major structural reforms and the growing relevance of the Economic Survey in Mint.

First, for the very first time since the onset of the planning era in 1951, the distinction between “Plan” and “non-Plan” expenditure has been abolished...The railway budget, for the first time in independent India, has been merged into the regular Union budget... As India becomes a more normal economy, and the annual budget statement becomes more of a ritual and less of a spectacle, what, in my judgement, will grow in importance is the annual Economic Survey for the year gone by.

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