This week’s Messenger is a blow by blow of a recently concluded deliberation on the Union Budget - we want to give you a sense for what it takes to do the kind of work we do. The context Imagine a middle-income family in India sitting around a table and planning its household budget. By the way, the term ‘economy’ is derived from the Greek ‘oikonomia,’ i.e., ‘household management.’ So this family is labouring under a venerable history of being homo economicus. Each month, they spend their time ruminating on how to spend their money. They have their constraints and their desires. Every family has experienced these pressures at some level, and the need to decide priorities, and how to allocate funds. If the nation is the family writ large, the Union Budget of India is household management for the whole country and impacts everyone in ways that may not always be easy to see, especially by citizens such as farmers who aren’t considered sophisticated.