Beyond Budget Day: Why Public Financial Management Is About What Happens Next
As India prepares to present its Union Budget on 1 February, attention once again turns to headline numbers, sectoral allocations, and new policy announcements. This moment—highly visible and politically salient—often comes to define how budgets are discussed and analysed.
Yet from a public financial management (PFM) perspective, the passing of a budget is only the beginning.
Once budgets are approved, governments across the world move into far less visible - but far more consequential - phases of execution, course correction, and adjustment. It is during these stages that policy intent is tested: through fund flows across levels of government, administrative capacity to deploy resources, and day-to-day spending decisions that shape whether public services actually reach people.
Budgets signal priorities, but outcomes depend on what happens next.
Across countries and sectors, gaps between budgeted allocations and actual spending are common. Delays in releases, rigid design features, limited sub-national capacity, and weak monitoring systems can all constrain implementation. Even well-designed policies can underperform if resources do not move smoothly through the system or if spending arrangements lack flexibility to respond to local conditions.
Without sustained budget tracking after approval, these dynamics often remain difficult to observe. Aggregate expenditure figures can obscure where bottlenecks arise, how incentives shape behaviour, and why similar policies produce uneven results across jurisdictions.
This is why post-budget analysis—focused on execution rather than announcements—is central to understanding how public finance works in practice. Tracking how money flows, where spending stalls, and how utilisation patterns evolve offers insights into governance quality and state capacity that headline figures alone cannot provide.
One way to do this is through scheme or programme-level budget tracking that combines allocations with administrative and expenditure data. Over the past month, the Foundation for Responsive Governance (ResGov) has examined these issues through a series called Budget Insights, analysing not only how much is allocated to major public programmes, but how funds are structured, released, and utilised.
The briefs are organised thematically across four policy areas
Environment and Clean Energy
In environment and clean energy, they examine large public investments aimed at river rejuvenation and India’s solar energy transition, highlighting how design choices and implementation capacity shape outcomes.Health
In health, the briefs examine the flexible financing arrangements under the National Health Mission - India’s main public health programme, and how different components from reproductive and child health, communicable and non-communicable diseases, and health system strengthening are prioritised and utilised by sub-national governments under varying institutional constraints.
Housing
In housing, the briefs look at India’s ambitious “Housing for All” programme, which aims to build 68 million houses across both rural and urban areas, and try to unpack how allocations have translated into completed housing units.
Education
For education, they examine India’s flagship school education program with a focus on proposal–approval gaps, shortfalls in fund releases, and spending. It also delves into how states prioritise spending across components—revealing the policy choices embedded in budget execution.
Taken together, these analyses illustrate a broader point relevant far beyond the Indian context. Budget execution is not a mechanical process of spending down allocations; it is shaped by incentives, rules, and administrative systems that determine how public money is used. Understanding and examining these processes helps explain why similar policies can yield very different results across regions or over time.
As budget conversations continue—whether in India or elsewhere—there is growing scope to shift attention from announcements to implementation. Comparative and grounded work on budget and execution tracking can play a critical role in strengthening accountability and improving public service delivery.
Ultimately, if budgets are where governments state their intentions, PFM is about understanding how those intentions translate into real-world results. Looking beyond budget day is not optional; it is essential.
(image sourced from publicdomainvectors)
