BackUnion budget: Explore finance ministers’ speeches
A word analysis of all Union budget speeches of finance ministers since 1947
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If the Union Budget speech is a statement of a government’s priorities, here’s what—and when—all the finance ministers of India stressed on and brushed away.
Use the box above to search for specific words, or phrases (up to two words long), that occurred in budget speeches since 1947. To start you off, we have plotted the frequency with which a finance minister used the words ‘agriculture’, ‘manufacturing’ or ‘services’ in their speech over the years. Interestingly, even as agriculture’s share in gross domestic product (GDP) declined over the years, finance ministers continued to speak a lot about it. That’s possibly because it has remained a major employer in the economy, accounting for half the workforce. Mousing over, or tapping on, the plot tells us the finance minister in charge at that point in time.
On the other hand, as the importance of services increased, it found increasing mention in speeches. Mention of ‘manufacturing’ too has increased, though it is remarkable how little attention finance ministers chose to give it, until recently.
One limitation of this tool is that it ignores context. For instance, it would be good to know why a finance minister chose to talk about a particular subject. Mentions of the ‘rupee’, for instance, spiked when India faced major foreign exchange difficulties.
Source and methodology
All Union budget speeches, beginning 1947, were downloaded from indiabudget.nic.in and converted to text. For speech lengths, special characters (for example, punctuation) were removed. For calculating frequencies, numbers were also removed.
The graphical readings indicate the occurrence of a word in speeches, in percent. In order to smoothen the data, we have taken a three-year moving average. So, for example, the word ‘services’ has a frequency of 0.21% in 2013. This is the simple average of the number of times it occurred as a percentage of the total words in each of the speeches of 2011, 2012 and 2013. Values for the first and last years (1947-48 and 2014-15) are unaveraged.
(howindialives.com is a Delhi-based startup that is developing a search engine for public data to make it more accessible to decision-makers)
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