The Union government is discontinuing the practice of providing printed copies of the annual Economic Survey and the Budget to the media and the public.
What is the current move?
Usually every accredited journalist will be provided a copy.
Institutions and corporates could buy a copy of the Budget and Economic Survey at a subsidised price.
These practises are dropped.
This year onwards, only the 788 members of Parliament will receive copies of these documents.
What is the need?
Parliament has been reducing the print run of all documents. It is an attempt to go green.
It is in line with a recommendation of a Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance, which asked the government to print fewer copies of the Economic Survey and the Budget.
Both the Economic Survey and the Budget are technical documents and experts can easily access them from the government website for analysis.
Consequently the government has been reducing the print run in past two years, up to 60%. This was achieved by limiting the allocation of Budget copies to just three per media house.
It is in line with other initiatives like Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of Electric Vehicles (FAME), carbon tax petroleum products and other targets set for renewable energy capacity creation.
It will bring down the barriers to the implementation on the right to information front.
What are the disadvantages?
The total cost of printing the Budget documents is around 70 lakh. Therefore this move will not lead to huge savings.
Instead of stopping printing, the government could have linked the printing of Budget documents to sustainable agro-forestry i.e finding sustainable solutions like using dead trees only than resorting to superficial curbs on consumption.
The Economic Survey and the Union Budget are two of the most critical documents. Curbing the print version inhibits distribution of information that help people to understand the government's functioning and efficiency.
Though the subscribers have been increasing at a faster rate, still only a small minority of people has access to the Internet.
True goal of going green can only be achieved if the government shift to a paperless way of functioning instead of discontinuing the printing of Budget documents.
