On Sunday, February 1, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will present the Union Budget 2026-27—the first time India’s Budget will be tabled on a weekend. With this, Parliament’s most critical financial instrument, the Appropriation Bill, will come into play. The bill authorizes the government to withdraw funds from the Consolidated Fund of India for the fiscal year’s expenditure. Through it, Parliament exercises its constitutional power as vested in Article 112, Article 113, and Article 114 to scrutinize and approve government spending—ensuring no public money is spent without the consent of the people’s representatives.
When these provisions were taken up for debate (as Draft Articles 92 and 93) in the Constieunt Assembly, the economist K.T. Shah insisted that independent India’s Parliament must in principle have the power to vote on any expenditure. The idea of keeping certain expenditures outside the ambit of a parliamentary vote, he continued, was a legacy of British rule:
‘For that regime, no doubt, it can be understood that there were many items of expenditure which it did not care, would not dare, to bring before the representatives of the Indian people. For instance, its huge defence expenditure, or its Home charges, and so on, if open to a Parliamentary vote, would never allow the Budget to be passed.’
In a similar vein, Shibban Lal Saxena pointed to a sub-clause in Draft Article 93 that allowed future parliaments to add to the list of expenditures that did not require parliamentary approval. Saxena appeared rather livid, and termed the provision as ‘…unprecedented in any constitution of the world…’ and asked Ambedkar to ‘…enlighten us how [the provision exception is] in consonance with democratic procedure…’ He felt that India’s ‘…sovereign parliament of the nation should have the right vote on every item of expenditure…’
The constitutional provision shielding certain expenditures from parliamentary vote has deep roots in British colonial governance. The Government of India Act 1935, established a similar framework where specific categories of spending remained beyond legislative scrutiny. Under Section 33(3) of the 1935 Act, expenditure items including the Governor-General’s salary, debt charges, and salaries of judges were classified as “charged upon the revenues” and exempted from the vote of the legislature. This colonial-era financial architecture was designed not to protect democratic institutions, but to insulate British administrative machinery from Indian political oversight.
The question facing the Constituent Assembly was whether independent India should perpetuate this colonial practice, even if for different reasons. While the British used it to maintain imperial control, could India justify it as a safeguard for constitutional democracy? The Assembly’s silence in response to Shah and Saxena’s objections suggests they believed the answer was yes.
Where the British Act used this provision to protect imperial interests and ensure continuity of colonial administration regardless of Indian political opposition, the Constitution’s framers repurposed it to safeguard the independence of democratic institutions. The items exempted from parliamentary vote—salaries of the President, judges, and constitutional authorities—were meant to preserve the separation of powers and prevent legislative overreach, not to bypass representative government.