New Delhi: While the revised slabs for personal income taxes, announced by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman as part of the 2023 Union Budget, dominated conversations in newsrooms and street corners Wednesday, the subject hardly monopolised the minister’s speech.
A scan of Sitharaman’s speech by ThePrint using text-analysing tools via data science shows “infrastructure” was the word she used the most in the course of her presentation — about 26 times.
According to ThePrint’s analysis, the reason it appears so many times is because infrastructure and investment is a part of the ‘saptarishi‘, or seven priorities, of this year’s Union Budget.
Infrastructure also appeared as part of the finance minister’s speech on the remaining six among the saptarishis — inclusive development, reaching the last mile, unleashing potential, green growth, youth power and the financial sector.
Infrastructure was followed by the word ‘digital’, which found 21 mentions in Sitharaman’s speech. Just like infrastructure, the word digital too was used in multiple contexts, ranging from digital libraries to digital infrastructure and digital payments.
The word ‘green’ also appeared 21 times in Sitharaman’s speech, mostly used in the context of environment. The word appeared barely eight times in the four previous budgets Sitharaman has presented as finance minister.
With ‘green growth’ being one of the saptarishis the finance minister prioritised in her speech, phrases like green technology, green credit and green energy appeared repeatedly.
The words ‘capital’, ‘scheme’, ‘investment’ and ‘mission’, were all uttered more than 15 times in the course of her speech.
Sitharaman, who called the 2023 budget the first presented during Amrit Kaal (a reference to the government’s roadmap for the 25 years following 75 years of Indian independence), the finance minister also used the word ‘amrit’ at least 12 times in the course of her speech.
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Changing lexicon
ThePrint had earlier reported on how the Finance Minister was reshaping the budget lexicon. During her tenure, and compared to budget speeches of previous finance ministers, Sitharaman has displayed a more frequent use of words like infrastructure, investment and capital and made fewer references to farmer and rural economy, ThePrint’s analysis has shown.
Her 2023 Budget Speech remained true to that tenor.
The word infrastructure has become Sitharaman’s most-used word in budget speeches and the finance minister has used it a total of 138 times in five budget speeches.
In comparison, the finance minister used the word ‘farmers’ just 14 times this year and 59 times in total in all her budget speeches. In comparison, former finance minister Arun Jaitley, who preceded Sitharaman, had used the word farmers 94 times during his five-year tenure.
The rural-urban divide also continued to be visible in her choice of words this year. While she used the word ‘rural’ four times in the course of her speech Wednesday, the word ‘urban’ appeared 12 times. In the past five years, Sitharaman has used ‘urban’ 44 times in her budget speeches, whereas the word ‘rural’ appeared 28 times.
In contrast, Jaitley had used the word ‘urban’ only 18 times in budget speeches made by him, while the word ‘rural’ appeared 98 times in his speeches, according to the text-analysing tools.
(Edited by Poulomi Banerjee)
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