Govt's $63.3B budget gives more to pensioners, taxes remote digital services

Fi­nance Min­is­ter Dav­en­dranath Tan­coo has pre­sent­ed a $63.368 bil­lion na­tion­al bud­get for fis­cal year 2027 to­day, an­chor­ing the pack­age with across-the-board in­creas­es in so­cial wel­fare grants, an al­lo­ca­tion of near­ly $2.5 bil­lion for pub­lic sec­tor wage ar­rears, and tar­get­ed tax mea­sures aimed at re­mote dig­i­tal ser­vices, cor­po­rate loss­es, and high-us­age elec­tric­i­ty con­sumers.

De­liv­er­ing the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress ad­min­is­tra­tion’s sec­ond bud­get un­der the theme "A Peo­ple-Cen­tered Ap­proach: In­vest­ing in Com­mu­ni­ties, Trans­form­ing the Econ­o­my and Se­cur­ing a Sus­tain­able Fu­ture," Min­is­ter Tan­coo pro­ject­ed to­tal rev­enue of $59.729 bil­lion, leav­ing an es­ti­mat­ed fis­cal deficit of $3.639 bil­lion, or 2.1 per cent of Gross Do­mes­tic Prod­uct.

The fis­cal frame­work is pegged against an as­sumed crude oil price of US$77.00 per bar­rel and a nat­ur­al gas net­back price of US$5.00 per MMB­tu, with en­er­gy re­ceipts es­ti­mat­ed at $14.355 bil­lion and non-oil rev­enues pro­ject­ed at $45.062 bil­lion.