How the Union Budget redefined its audience

This analysis is based on Thurro’s AI-led reading of Union Budget speeches between FY2019 and FY2026. Instead of examining each Budget as a standalone event, Thurro’s AI-driven platform processes Budget speeches across years, allowing shifts in language, structure, emphasis, and time horizon to be identified at scale. 

By structuring Budget documents into a searchable, comparable database and applying AI-assisted thematic and linguistic analysis, Thurro enables patterns to emerge that are difficult to detect through manual reading alone. This approach makes it possible to trace how the function of the Union Budget itself has evolved over time—beyond individual announcements or headline measures. 

In the first note of this series, we analysed how the Budget speeches have evolved over time. In this note, we analyse how they have redefined their intended audience and economic priorities over the years. Read across speeches between FY2019 and FY2026, a clear shift emerges in who the Budget is written for—from a broad, universal address to increasingly defined economic actors positioned as central to growth.

Thurro’s AI-based analysis of Budget speeches from these years shows that this evolution is subtle and cumulative. Changes in language, framing, and emphasis reveal a movement from addressing citizens collectively, to naming specific social groups, and eventually to foregrounding productive participants within the economy.

Before the pandemic, Budget speeches largely adopted a universal tone. They addressed a broad, economy-wide audience rather than specific groups and their economic roles.

Support for constituencies during this phase was primarily indirect. Structural reforms, governance improvements, and macroeconomic stability were framed as benefiting everyone through growth, efficiency, and better delivery. References to farmers, women, youth, and the poor appeared, but largely within broader narratives of reform and inclusive development rather than through targeted focus.

Even when long-term aspirations such as a USD 5 trillion economy were articulated, the Budget addressed audiences collectively rather than by specific economic roles.

The FY2022 Budget marked a sharp break in audience definition. Delivered during the Covid-19 pandemic, it addressed the most vulnerable groups directly.

The implied audience narrowed decisively toward those most exposed to economic shock: the poor, informal workers, small farmers, and households facing food and income insecurity. Language around protection, survival, and continuity dominated. Programmes such as free foodgrain distribution, direct cash transfers, and emergency health spending were framed as essential to social and economic stability.

During this phase, the Budget spoke less about participation and more about protection. Citizens were addressed primarily as recipients of state support, with emphasis on scale, coverage, and speed of delivery.

As the pandemic receded, the Budget’s audience broadened—but in a more structured way.

The introduction of Amrit Kaal expanded the planning horizon from decade-long ambitions to a 25-year national trajectory. Within this longer frame, the Budget began naming constituencies explicitly. Farmers, women, youth, Other Backward Classes (OBCs), and the Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) were increasingly referenced as distinct groups, each tied to specific priorities and schemes.

In this phase, inclusion was framed less as emergency relief and more as access—to infrastructure, platforms, skills, finance, and opportunity. The language shifted toward coverage, saturation, and capability building, signalling a transition from crisis support to developmental participation.

By FY2025 and FY2026, the Budget’s implied audience had sharpened further. The declaration of four major castes—Garib (poor), Mahilayen (women), Yuva (youth), and Annadata (farmers)—marked a decisive move toward explicit constituency definition. Yet the framing had evolved. These groups were no longer addressed primarily as beneficiaries, but as contributors to growth.

Youth were discussed in terms of skilling, employability pipelines, and workforce readiness. MSMEs were positioned as engines of output, exports, and employment. The middle class emerged more clearly as an economic actor, with emphasis on spending power, consumption, and confidence. Farmers were increasingly framed through productivity, resilience, and integration into value chains.

The Budget’s language now assumed participation. Growth was no longer something delivered to citizens, but something built with them—through work, enterprise, and consumption capacity.

As this transition unfolded, certain elements receded from the Budget’s address. Emotional appeals became less frequent. Vulnerability-driven framing gave way to agency. References to protection and entitlement were gradually replaced by language of productivity, contribution, and systems. The Budget started speaking to those positioned within the growth process, rather than to society at large.

Across FY2019 to FY2026, the Union Budget’s implied audience follows a clear progression:

• From universal, reform-mediated inclusion
• To crisis-driven protection of the vulnerable
• To targeted inclusion through access and capability
• To a sharper focus on productive economic participants

This shift reflects a deeper change in how the state imagines growth, and who it believes growth is built around.

Cover photo credit: Ola website

View disclaimer

Next: How employment and work has been framed in Budget speeches

This is the second in a series of Thurro analysis notes in the run-up to the Union Budget 2026. You can explore the underlying analysis interactively on our Thurro Answers Notebook or download the PDF version below to read offline.