A People’s Budget

As Jammu and Kashmir prepares to present its budget for the coming fiscal year, the administration stands at a critical juncture. The Union Territory’s economic landscape bears the scars of prolonged uncertainty, yet it also presents opportunities for transformative change. What J&K needs now is not merely a financial statement but a comprehensive economic vision. It should be a budget that addresses ground realities and lays the foundation for sustainable prosperity.

Understanding the Ground Reality

The economic challenges facing J&K are multifaceted. Unemployment rates, particularly among educated youth, remain alarmingly high. The private sector continues to struggle in creating its space in the economy of J&K with issues of creditworthiness and access to institutional finance. Agriculture, which employs nearly half the population, remains vulnerable to climate uncertainties and market volatilities. Meanwhile, the tourism sector, despite its revival, has not translated into broad-based economic benefits for local communities. The industrial base remains weak, and the manufacturing sector’s contribution to GSDP continues to lag behind national averages.

These challenges are compounded by infrastructural deficits like poor road connectivity in rural areas, unreliable power supply, inadequate healthcare facilities, and an education system struggling to meet contemporary demands. The fiscal situation itself constrains policy options, with the UT heavily dependent on central transfers while own tax revenues remain limited.

Prioritizing Employment Generation

Any meaningful budget must place employment generation at its core. The administration should announce a comprehensive J&K Employment Mission with clearly defined targets and timelines. This requires a multi-pronged approach: first, aggressive promotion of labour-intensive sectors like food processing, handicrafts, and tourism services through fiscal incentives and simplified regulatory frameworks. Second, establishment of sector-specific skill development centres aligned with market demands, particularly in hospitality, healthcare, construction, and IT-enabled services.

The budget should allocate substantial resources for entrepreneurship development, creating a dedicated fund for youth start-ups with easier access criteria than conventional banking channels. Special provisions for women entrepreneurs and marginalized communities would ensure inclusive growth. Additionally, reviving and strengthening industrial estates with modern amenities, reliable power, and streamlined clearances can catalyse manufacturing activities and create employment opportunities.

Agricultural Transformation

Agriculture needs strategic intervention rather than populist measures. The budget must move beyond conventional subsidy regimes toward creating sustainable value chains. Allocation for establishing farmer producer organizations, cold storage facilities, and processing units should be significantly enhanced. These infrastructural investments would reduce post-harvest losses, currently estimated at substantial portions of total production, while enabling farmers to capture greater value.

Crop diversification must be incentivized through technical support and assured procurement mechanisms. High-value crops like saffron, walnuts, and organic vegetables offer tremendous potential but require investment in quality certification, branding, and market linkages. The budget should establish a dedicated Agricultural Marketing and Value Addition Corporation to facilitate these objectives.

Climate-resilient farming practices deserve special attention given increasing weather uncertainties. Subsidies should be restructured to promote micro-irrigation, protected cultivation, and soil health management rather than conventional input subsidies that often benefit traders more than farmers.

Strategic Infrastructure

Infrastructure allocation must follow strategic priorities rather than populist distribution. Rural connectivity deserves top billing. Every inhabited village should have all-weather road access within defined timelines. This single intervention would unlock economic potential, improve access to education and healthcare, and reduce rural-urban disparities.

However, infrastructure development must be viewed through a sustainable lens. The alarming reality of felling lakhs of trees and destroying productive orchards to make way for roads and railways demands urgent policy recalibration. We are witnessing wanton environmental destruction for infrastructure projects driven more by political optics than genuine developmental necessity. The budget must enforce strict ecological criteria for all new road and rail projects. There should be a mandate for comprehensive environmental impact assessments and genuine cost-benefit analyses that account for the true cost of lost forest cover, disrupted ecosystems, and destroyed agricultural land. Projects that cannot justify their environmental footprint should be abandoned, regardless of funds already allocated. Where connectivity is genuinely needed, the budget must mandate eco-sensitive designs, minimal land acquisition, and compensatory afforestation that goes beyond tokenism to actual ecological restoration.

Power sector reforms cannot wait. The budget must allocate resources for smart metering, distribution system upgrades, and addressing transmission losses that burden both consumers and the exchequer. However, the complete disregard for ecology while making hydropower projects is costing us dearly. The price we pay includes disrupted river ecosystems, destroyed aquatic biodiversity, increased vulnerability to flash floods and cloudbursts, altered microclimates, and compromised water security for downstream communities. Recent disasters have clearly demonstrated what happens when we tamper with natural drainage patterns and river flows without adequate environmental safeguards. The budget must impose a moratorium on ecologically destructive hydropower projects and redirect resources toward genuinely sustainable alternatives. Renewable energy, particularly decentralized solar power and community-based micro-grids, offers clean alternatives that align with J&K’s fragile ecology.

Urban infrastructure in smaller towns has been neglected. Satellite townships need planned development with adequate water supply, sewerage, and public transport to decongest main cities and distribute economic opportunities more equitably.

Healthcare and Education

The pandemic exposed serious gaps in healthcare infrastructure. The budget must substantially increase allocation for strengthening primary and secondary healthcare facilities, ensuring quality medical services are available within reasonable distances. Recruitment of medical professionals, particularly specialists for remote areas through attractive incentive packages, should be prioritized.

Education requires both quantitative expansion and qualitative improvement. Infrastructure gaps in schools must be addressed alongside teacher training, digital learning resources, and vocational education integration. Establishing centres of excellence in emerging fields would reduce talent outmigration while attracting students from other regions.

Sustainable and Inclusive Tourism

Tourism has rebounded but its benefits remain concentrated. The budget should promote homestays, community-based tourism, and development of offbeat destinations to ensure broader participation in tourism revenues. Investment in essential tourism infrastructure like clean public facilities, interpretation centres, adventure sports facilities would enhance visitor experience while enabling premium pricing.

Crucially, tourism development must be environmentally sustainable. Funds should be earmarked for waste management systems in tourist areas, conservation of heritage sites, and regulation of construction activities in ecologically sensitive zones.

Fiscal Reforms and Revenue Generation

A people-oriented budget also requires fiscal discipline and revenue enhancement. Property tax reforms with updated valuations and improved collection mechanisms could significantly boost own revenues. Similarly, rationalization of professional taxes and improved GST compliance through technology adoption would strengthen the fiscal base.

However, revenue generation should not become regressive. The focus should be on expanding the tax base rather than increasing rates, and on reducing leakages through better administration rather than introducing new levies.

Social Security and Inclusion

Economic growth means little if it does not reach the marginalized. The budget must ensure adequate provisioning for social security schemes, particularly old-age pensions and disability allowances, with amounts revised to reflect current costs of living. Special attention should go to the rehabilitation and skill development of disadvantaged groups.

Financial inclusion remains incomplete. Budgetary support for extending banking services to unbanked areas, along with financial literacy programs, would empower communities to participate in the formal economy.

Implementation

The finest budget fails without effective implementation. Allocations must be accompanied by clear timelines, accountability mechanisms, and regular monitoring. Department-wise outcome budgets should be made public which will enable citizens to track progress. Technology should be leveraged for transparent fund utilization and grievance redressal. All the major initiatives should have dedicated implementation cells with representation from all stakeholder departments.

J&K’s budget must transcend the traditional exercise of allocating funds across departments. It should articulate a clear economic vision, prioritize interventions that address ground realities, and commit resources strategically rather than spreading them thin. Employment generation, agricultural transformation, sustainable infrastructure development, and human capital enhancement must form the pillars of this budget.

Above all, it must be a budget that restores hope and confidence. It should demonstrate that the administration understands people’s aspirations and is committed to translating them into tangible outcomes. The people of J&K deserve economic normalcy and prosperity built on ecological wisdom. This budget must mark the beginning of that transformation through prudent policies, adequate allocations, and implementation.

Malik Daniyal is a final year economics student at University of Delhi.