India, By the Numbers

This is the standard breakdown the Budget itself publishes, in the order it usually appears — for every ₹100 the central government raised in 2026-27, here's where it came from, with a plain-language note on what each line actually means.

The same ₹100, spent. This is a different cut from the ministry-by-ministry table further down — this one is by budget head (who the money legally must go to, or what kind of spending it is), not by which ministry administers it.

Note the two biggest lines — states' share of taxes (22%) and interest payments (20%) — together are 42% of all spending, and neither is discretionary: one is a constitutional/legal obligation to states, the other is the bill for past borrowing. Less than 6 rupees in 10 are actually available for the government's own new spending choices in a given year.

Defence, Roads, Railways, and Home Affairs are the four ministries with government- disclosed expenditure shares; the rest above are derived by dividing each disclosed crore figure by total expenditure. This table mixes ministry budgets with the budget-head view above — a rupee inside “Defence” here also counts inside “Central sector schemes” or “Defence” above, so do not add the two sections together.

A Section 87A rebate of ₹60,000 brings tax liability to zero for taxable income up to ₹12 lakh. With the ₹75,000 standard deduction for salaried taxpayers, gross salary up to roughly ₹12.75 lakh is effectively tax-free under this regime. These slabs were unchanged in the 2026 Budget, carried over from the prior year.

Taxpayers may still elect the old regime, which allows deductions (Section 80C, HRA, home-loan interest, and others) the new regime does not. The new regime is the default if no election is made.

A surcharge (7% or 12%, depending on income level) and a 4% Health & Education Cess apply on top of these base rates.

The September 2025 “GST 2.0” reform collapsed the previous four-slab structure (5% / 12% / 18% / 28%) into essentially two working slabs (5% and 18%) plus a new 40% slab for sin/luxury goods, moving most items previously taxed at 12% or 28% into the 5% or 18% bands respectively.

This site could not find a single official “resolution rate” percentage published alongside these figures, so none is asserted here — inventing one would violate this site's own sourcing standard. What the data does show directly: the backlog is growing, not shrinking — Supreme Court pendency rose 11.4% and High Court pendency rose 4.75% over the periods measured — which means courts are disposing of cases more slowly than new ones arrive, not that a fixed share of cases goes unresolved forever.

“Internal” debt is rupee-denominated borrowing from domestic lenders — banks, insurers, provident funds, the RBI, and retail investors — mainly through government bonds and treasury bills sold at auction (the ₹17.2 lakh crore of gross market borrowing planned for 2026-27, above, is the single biggest addition to this pile each year). This is who the 20% of every rupee spent on “interest payments” above is actually paid to.

This is a separate, narrower number from India's total external debt — a broader national-accounts measure that also counts foreign borrowing by Indian companies and banks, not just the government — which stood at roughly $762.8 billion as of March 2026, over half of it denominated in US dollars.

Absolute rupee figures from decades ago are not meaningful on their own — inflation and a much smaller economy make old rupee amounts incomparable to today's. Debt as a share of GDP is the standard way this is tracked over time. Reliable year-by-year figures going all the way back to 1947 were not found in the sources reviewed for this page; the series below starts from 1960, the earliest point with consistent data.

The debt ratio was relatively stable through the 1960s–80s (37–42%), climbed steadily from the 1990s liberalisation era through the 2010s (53% to 72%), then spiked sharply in 2020–21 as COVID-19 shrank the economy while emergency spending rose — the single largest one-year jump in India's post-reform history — before easing back down toward the mid-50s in the years since.

India does not hold all elections on a fixed 4-year cycle — Lok Sabha and most state assembly terms run 5 years, and state elections are staggered across different years rather than held together. A Delimitation Bill introduced in 2026 proposes raising the Lok Sabha from 543 to 850 seats; it has not taken effect as of this page's publication.

Prices have not just risen — they have compounded, year after year, for decades. Overall, consumer prices in 2026 are estimated at roughly 4.55× their 2000 level — a cumulative rise of about 354.57% (roughly a 6.00% average annual rate) — meaning ₹100 in 2000 bought what takes about ₹455 today.

Inflation has actually been trending down, not up — 2025's average of 2.09% is one of the lowest on record, well below the long-run (1960-2025) average of roughly 7.2-7.4%, and far below the 12.4% peak hit in 2009-10. The complaint that “everything is expensive” is consistent with this data: prices keep rising every year, they just rise more slowly now than in past decades. A slower rate of increase is not the same as prices coming down.

Reliable, cleanly comparable 2000-vs-2026 figures for milk, rice, and gold were not found in the sources reviewed for this page and are deliberately left out rather than estimated. What could be confirmed for gold: the price per 10 grams rose from roughly ₹4,400 (2000) to over ₹1,60,000 by 2026 — a rise of well over 30×, making gold one of the few assets that has outpaced, not just tracked, the cost of living.