India could shift to a January to December financial year from 2018, as the Centre appears set to make the historical transition to end the 150-year-old tradition of an April to March fiscal.
Accordingly the next Union Budget could be presented by the Narendra Modi-led National Democratic Alliance in November this year, according to people aware of the matter.
These people said the government is working on aligning the financial year with the calendar year after Prime Minister Narendra Modi pitched for a change.
This would be another historic change after advancement of the budget presentation to 1 February this year, ending the decades-old practice of presenting the annual exercise in the last week of February.
According to the proposal under discussion, the budget session of Parliament would have to be held well before December so that the budgetary exercise can be concluded by the year-end.
Since it takes nearly two months for the conclusion of the budgetary exercise, the possible dates for holding the budget session could be the first week of November, the people said.
The financial year from 1 April to 31 March, currently in vogue nationally, was adopted in 1867 principally to align the Indian fiscal with that of the British government. Till then, the financial year in India used to commence on 1 May and end on 30 April of the following calendar year.
After Modi expressed his desire to align the financial year with the calendar year, the government had last year appointed a high-level committee to study the feasibility of shifting the financial year to 1 January. The panel submitted its report to finance minister Arun Jaitley in December.
Among the various factors, a NITI Aayog note had said that a change in the financial year was required as the current system leads to suboptimal utilization of working season.
It had also noted that the current financial year cycle was chosen without any reference to national culture and traditions or convenience of legislators.
Also, the financial year is not aligned with international practices and it impacted data collection and dissemination from the perspective of national accounts, according to the note prepared by NITI Aayog member Bibek Debroy and OSD Kishore Desai, citing experts.
A few months back, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance also recommended shifting the financial year to the January-December period.
Modi, while advocating a change in the financial year, had said that there is a need to develop robust arrangements that could function amid diversity. “Because of poor time management, many good initiatives and schemes had failed to deliver the anticipated results,” the prime minister had said.
Madhya Pradesh became the first state to announce shifting of its financial year format to January-December from 2018.
