Policy Asks and Expectations from Union Budget 2015-16

Important processes relating to government budgets in India have been constrained by some widely-acknowledged challenges in governance in the country. These challenges pertain to lack of adequate transparency in governance, limited space for public participation in processes of priority setting, and weak mechanisms of accountability of government staff. As a result, there are gaps in public policies for development, due to lack of adequate inputs from the vulnerable sections. There are also gaps in implementation of many of the development programmes due to limited transparency and weak accountability mechanisms, among other factors. The third kind of constraint is with regard to budgeting for the relevant policies due to limited public resources available for development sectors. It urges the Union Government to take into account some of the major concerns while shaping the country’s fiscal policy, over the coming years. This document presents a number of policy asks and expectations across a range of sectors, which have a direct bearing on the lives of the poor and underprivileged sections of the country’s population. These policy asks have been compiled by a group of civil society organisations (CSOs), taking into account both our substantive work towards assessing budgets (at the national and subnational level) from the perspective of the vulnerable sections, and the inputs from a large number of CSOs that have been working on development issues at the grassroots level.