The budget aligns with the government’s vision of Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas, outlining three key “kartavyas” or duties: accelerating economic growth, building people’s capacities through education, skills, and health, and ensuring inclusive access to resources for all.
In a landmark presentation today, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman unveiled the union budget 2026-27, emphasising human development as a cornerstone for achieving Viksit Bharat by 2047.
The budget aligns with the government’s vision of Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas, outlining three key “kartavyas” or duties: accelerating economic growth, building people’s capacities through education, skills, and health, and ensuring inclusive access to resources for all families, communities, and regions. Sitharaman highlighted that “India will continue to take confident steps towards Viksit Bharat by balancing ambition with inclusion.”
This focus on sectors like agriculture, education, labour, health, environment, livelihood, women, and employment aims to uplift vulnerable populations, boost productivity, and create sustainable opportunities. With an allocation of ₹1,62,671 crore for agriculture alone, the budget prioritizes rural and human-centric growth, addressing the needs of small and marginal farmers, women, and the differently-abled.
Boosting Agricultural Productivity and Farmer Incomes
Agriculture, which employs 46.1 per cent of India’s workforce according to the periodic labour force survey 2023-24, received a significant thrust in the budget. The finance minister announced an allocation of ₹1,62,671 crore for the sector, a 7 per cent increase from the previous year’s revised estimate. This funding underscores the government’s commitment to enhancing farmer incomes through productivity gains and entrepreneurship, particularly for small and marginal farmers who form the backbone of rural economies.
A flagship initiative is Bharat VISTAAR, a multilingual AI-powered agriculture tool that integrates AgriStack portals with ICAR’s agricultural practices and AI systems. Designed to help farmers with crop planning, weather advisories, pest management, and market information in regional languages, this tool aims to boost productivity, enable better decision-making, and reduce risks. By providing customised advisory services, it addresses the challenges of climate variability and market fluctuations, potentially benefiting millions of smallholders.
The budget also promotes diversification into high-value crops to increase incomes and create employment. Support for coconut, sandalwood, cashew, cocoa, walnuts, almonds, and pine nuts in coastal and suitable regions is a key highlight. India, the world’s largest coconut producer, coconut farming sustains livelihoods for 30 million people, including 10 million farmers. A dedicated coconut promotion scheme will enhance production through interventions like replacing non-productive trees with high-yield varieties in key states.
Similarly, programmes for Indian cashew and cocoa aim for self-reliance, export competitiveness, and premium global branding by 2030. The union government will partner with states to restore India’s sandalwood ecosystem, balancing environmental conservation with economic gains.
In allied sectors, animal husbandry – poised to generate quality jobs in rural and peri-urban areas – gets a boost through a credit-linked subsidy programme, scaling up and modernisation of livestock enterprises, and enhanced integrated value chains for livestock, dairy, and poultry. Encouragement for Livestock Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs) will strengthen collective bargaining and market access. Fisheries development includes integrated projects for 500 reservoirs and water bodies, fostering market linkages via startups, women-led groups, and Fish Farmer Producer Organisations (FFPOs). These measures align with the third kartavya, focusing on the North-East and Purvodaya states for accelerated development.
Enhancing Education and Skill Development
Education emerges as a pillar for building human capacity, with the budget allocating resources to foster inclusive access and innovation. A notable announcement is the establishment of girls’ hostels in every district, supported by viability gap funding (VGF) and capital aid, to address barriers like long study hours in STEM courses and enhance women’s safety and mobility. This initiative aims to boost female participation in higher education and the workforce.
To nurture talent, the government plans five university townships and content labs in 15,000 secondary schools for creative and digital skills. Focus on women in STEM and youth in technology includes an AI mission, national research fund, and innovation fund to build aspirations and capacities. National mental health institutes will address psychological well-being, complementing education’s holistic role.
Skill development ties into employment, with programs like SAMARTH 2.0 for industry-academia collaboration in textiles. These efforts support the second kartavya, emphasizing quality education and skilling for Viksit Bharat.
Promoting Employment in Labour-Intensive Sectors
Employment generation is central, with a focus on labour-intensive sectors to create sustainable livelihoods. The budget proposes an integrated programme for textiles, including mega parks under challenge mode for large-scale manufacturing and technical textiles. Support for khadi and handicrafts via the Mahatma Gandhi Gram Swaraj Initiative will improve production, global linkages, branding, and training, impacting rural economies.
The textile expansion and employment scheme aims to modernise clusters, while the national fibre scheme targets self-reliance in man-made fibres. These are expected to generate jobs for 22 lakh people, turnover of ₹4 lakh crore, and exports of ₹1.1 lakh crore. An emphasis has been placed in the footwear and leather sectors.
Potential ₹30,000 crore for the employment linked incentive scheme targets 350 million new jobs in one-and-a-half years. Apprenticeships and skilling in animation, visual effects, gaming, and comics (AVGC), healthcare, and tourism align with services-led growth.
Advancing Health and Well-Being
Health allocations emphasize accessibility and innovation. The biopharma shakti scheme, with ₹10,000 crore, proposes to position India as a global bio-pharma hub, intervening in manufacturing, healthcare, and advanced technology.
Mental health and trauma care for vulnerable groups, including national institutes, address psychosocial needs. Empowering divyangjan through divyang sahara yojana and kaushal yojana involves scaling ALIMCO’s assistive devices with AI. These support the third kartavya: inclusivity.
Empowering Women and Vulnerable Groups
The union budget 2026-27 delivers a comprehensive push for women’s empowerment and support to vulnerable groups, aligning with the vision of inclusive growth under Viksit Bharat. Building on the Lakhpati Didi programme – which is meant to enable millions of rural women to achieve annual incomes exceeding ₹1 lakh – the government has introduced SHE Marts (Self-Help Entrepreneurs Marts) as community-owned retail outlets within cluster-level federations of self-help groups (SHGs). These outlets, supported by enhanced and innovative financing instruments, aim to transition women from credit-linked livelihoods to enterprise ownership, improving market access, branding, and sustainable income generation for grassroots women entrepreneurs.
Complementing this, the budget announces the establishment of one girls’ hostel in every district, with viability gap funding and capital aid, to address barriers in higher education – particularly in STEM fields where prolonged study hours and laboratory work pose challenges to safety and mobility. This infrastructure boost is expected to enhance female enrolment, retention, and participation in advanced disciplines like astrophysics and astronomy, while fostering greater workforce integration.
For vulnerable sections, targeted measures include the divyang sahara yojana for timely access to high-quality assistive devices and the divyangjan kaushal yojana for customised, industry-relevant training in sectors like IT, AVGC, hospitality, and food and beverages – ensuring dignified livelihood opportunities and inclusion for persons with disabilities. Additional initiatives encompass mental health and trauma care access for vulnerable populations, alongside geriatric caregiver training programs, reinforcing the budget’s commitment to equitable participation and dignity for all under the third kartavya of Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas.
Environmental Stewardship and Climate Mitigation
The budget’s emphasis on environment is implicit in sustainable agriculture and sandalwood restoration, promoting eco-friendly livelihoods. Overall, these measures aim for resilient, inclusive growth, with Viksit Bharat as the guiding vision.
The union budget 2026 places a renewed emphasis on environmental sustainability, with an 8 per cent increase in allocation to the ministry of environment, forest and climate change (MoEFCC) totalling ₹3,759.46 crore. Pollution control remains a priority, receiving ₹1,091 crore to bolster pollution control boards and initiatives. Key measures include the establishment of rare earth corridors for mining, processing, and manufacturing essential for clean energy technologies, alongside a ₹20,000 crore investment over five years in carbon capture, utilisation, and storage (CCUS) to curb emissions from hard-to-abate industries.
Incentives for green technologies, such as duty exemptions on capital goods for lithium-ion batteries and solar glass production, aim to accelerate the shift to renewables. Additionally, excluding the value of biogas in excise duty calculations for blended CNG promotes cleaner fuels, aligning with India’s net-zero ambitions by 2070.
Image: PIB
