Vision of Life; by Sanjay: परंपरा, प्रतिष्ठा, अनुशासन; Union Budget 2026

“Most people aren’t broken because of income—they’re broke because of ignorance.”

― Joseph C. Kunz Jr

“Find your values, align your vision, charge your passion, connect with your purpose & then make a Budget.”

― Sabrina M J Constantin

“My understanding about the Budget is, it’s about not how much I will earn but about how much I can spend”__ Me

Keeping due respect to financial wizards like Joseph Cruz & Sabrina Constantine, whose words rescued me to start the sharing about the budget (Union Budget or country’s budget), a subject which makes me sick, nervous (Just the Maths used to make me in my engg days)! Yet, budget is something which is the backbone of my work systems & long back when I started as a fresh trainee engineer, I have learned the importance of the term budget! Though the sharing is about country’s budget which is as complex as “Climate Change” yet everybody can have his or her own say about it & being a businessman by myself I too have mine, & when your journalist friend asks you to pen down your thoughts about it, I did dig a bit in the subject & I could actually make a quote about it, in my own words too, lol! Agreed, a budget is a complex thing, especially for an engineer who could barely read his own company’s balance sheet but then that’s the bitter fact about financial literacy of this country’s education system as managing money in the right way is the last thing they taught you in normal education! All our education is so much focused on only to earn money but how to utilize or manage that money nobody teaches you & here is where budget’s importance comes in the picture, is my main reason for sharing!

Ohk, coming to understanding of the budget which is like a yearly ritual of our country & its impact on the share market which often is emotional more & logical less! Keeping in tune with this tradition, on budget day the share market crashed by nearly 2000 pints (plz google for meaning) but in the next three days it again bounced back to level from where it crashed, & I think this means it has nothing to do with the budget, logic, right? When its real estate, I wonder why just Finance Minister, not even our local bodies give any damn to our industry, so where it’s a Development Plan or TDR policy, if the govt is not taking in to consideration the people in business (read as builders) how can you expect the same govt will take builder’s consultation in thing like budget! And the outcome is that this year’s budget directly doesn’t give anything to real estate, a plain & simple outcome by a common engineer builder like me! Yet I tried to decode some aspects of it for other fellow builders so we can at least raise our voice (whom I am fooling, anyways)!

Coming to my understanding (read as take away) of Budget 26, I remembered the famous dialogue from the Bachchan-SRK starrer Mohabbatein & in the movie SRK used to mock it as a strong building standing on a hollow foundation!! Same way for real estate or say housing, this budget talks big but stands on thin air. Here, the 3 pillars i.e. Parampara, Pratishtha, Anushasan, are replaced by 3 Kartawys i.e. Building Capacity of People, Fulfilling People's Aspirations & Subka Saath Subka Vikas concept! Great, but like in the another Bollywood hit Sholay, when Dharampaaji climbs on overhead water tank and shouts "good bye gaonwalo" on which one villager explains another villager, meaning of good bye saying, "jub angrej loag kahi jate hai tub wo goodbye bolte hai", on this the other villager asks, "par ye angrej loag jate kaha hai?", on that the first villager turns his face away for having no answer! Same way, my question is, who & where are these people, who supposedly focus on Hon FM in the budget 26!! Definitely, they are not from real estate for sure as in the provisions of lakhs of crores of rupees for AI, Production, Railways, Tourism, Public Health, Creative Content, Défense, Education & all such fronts, FM madam seems has forgotten all this employment as well existing people will need homes & has forgotten that there is an industry which makes these homes!! Many will say, direct or indirect ultimately its real estate which will get benefit as need for space will increase & half of that sentence is true but that's lifetimes truth as space will always be in demand but how those spaces are going to be made or created i.e. Real estate, what about it??

About some other provisions, individual tax limits are always an important aspect for buying home for salaried urban People & with no major elections ahead in Central India (read as Maharashtra) no concrete thing is there for this class which is client of real estate, so not even indirect benefit is there for real estate or housing!! Infrastructure provision is another weak link, as you will connect Pune Mumbai but what about traffic, water, drainage in these cities as well public transport within & outward to these cities?? Rare minerals, NRI investment limits, Smart Universities & Amrit Yojana for small towns infra, well, high time we must acknowledge Metro cities like Pune, Bengaluru as separate industries in itself & Growth Engines for which no direct provisions are made! Then let’s take in to account commuting between major cities which indeed is need for residents of these cities but just making high speed trains won’t achieve anything as take example of Pune -Nagpur route, there are eight railways on this route & all are full almost throughout the year, means we need to study the commuting volume & then increase the intensity (more rails) on the routes which has never happened, making people dependant of private vehicles of spend more for air travel! Rather we need new tracks, more trains, get over the age-old concept of one Up & one Down rail track system as why can’t we have four laned railway tracks, as it will save land acquisition also & will help in increasing the carrying capacity of the railways. But for such thoughts you need to take into account what is actually pinching to the people in the industry as we are year, nose, eyes of end users, just take us in confidence while making a budget, is my appeal to Hon FM!

As one main aspect of the budget as per FM madam is, EoD i.e. Ease of Doing Business but that's one of the vaguest (deceptive) tag lines, as what are concrete provisions for making that happen & for real estate, nothing on that! Rather on the very next day of Budget announcement Pune Municipal Corporation issued a circular saying hereafter to demolish existing buildings for development there will be a NOC to be obtained from PMC, means one more hurdle, so, where is Ease of Doing Business, is my question to Hon FM! And such there are hundreds of speed breakers, hurdles, or obstacles everywhere, need of obtaining a NA certificate even when your project is in a residential zone & weirdest is obtaining an NOC of mining for excavation of building foundations, just great! Joke is, Hon FM mentions Ease of Doing business but why can’t she order or make direct provisions which will make that ease thing happen, is another question to her! Real estate needs policies, fund provision, priority finance, funding for purchasing land which is raw material, & GST reduction if you want to make Homes affordable, nothing on it!! And here the main problem is neither Hon FM nor any govt official (read as rulers) feel the need of taking the opinion of businessmen in account for this Budget thingy as they think they know it all & that’s our country’s biggest problem, especially for real estate! Take a simple example of construction material or infra items, with high rise buildings is a fact, we need a special type of shuttering made of Aluminium called as My One & which is made by a Korean company. This we all know from decades but nothing has been done to manufacture this shuttering material in our country as giving tax exemptions to the same, which will actually make construction cheaper & help in reducing home prices! There are thousands of such suggestions out of which 18% GST on labour contracts is also one weird thing as construction industry supports probably the maximum numbers of lower classes (financially) of the society & burdening this class with 18% GST is seriously wrong & that directly adds to the cost of home making, rather now a days even profit margins also are not that high in contracting; in nutshell, in any civil labour contract, the govt earns more than the contractor, if my understanding is wrong then I am sorry but my engineering logic says so!

Here one will say the govt earns through these taxes & use that money for infrastructure, but again speaking about real estate, Hon FM, please check the conditions local bodies put on the developer for any project! As right from providing water or drainage or road like basic facilities, for which again the local body (read as govt) charges to the builder, an undertaking is taken from the builder that all these will be provided by the builder only to the occupants! Wow, just wow, as if you call this as Ease of Doing Business then what it will be in your directory Normal Business, I just can’t imagine! And then again my basic question, about providing infra to the cities, why the budget doesn’t make it mandatory to the civic bodies to keep record & mandate for utilizing funds which has been allotted to them via budget & maintain transparency in the same, as if that money if for the citizens 9read as businessmen too) then we must be kept in loop as all these development are directly related to fate of real estate in respective region or city, right? As well why the Finance ministry doesn’t put local bodies under their scanner or have direct control on them when they allocate crores of budget money to these bodies as leave apart actual execution of infra projects the DPs’ of cities, towns, regions kept lingering for years & add to that weirdest policies related to ownership documents, revenue record lacunas, buying a land & developing it becomes game only for moneyed ones or the ones with muscle power & this is the reason of failure of making affordable homes for the needy ones which is main reason for illegal construction! All this can be stopped with just a little bit of openness of accepting suggestions from some sane minds in real estate which never happens & that’s why budget after budget real estate gets more disappointed only, is a fact! The way the govt keeps tab on wrong doings via ED, DRI & CBI, same way high time a special task force State wise to be created for monitoring progress of infra projects especially in cities which are being done under Central Govt funding as then only such budget provisions will help real estate!

And the biggest hurdle for a right (I am not saying good) budget for real estate is the misconception that real estate is like a gold mine & everybody always earns a lot more eventually! It was right a few years back but even Golden Egg laying hen also dries up if you cut her down (plz google for the phrase & its meaning) which has happened with real estate. Agreed a land is probably the only commodity which doesn’t have expiry date or depreciation concept but what about the person who has holding that land & trying to develop it, he can surely go bankrupt, right? And if you see today’s newspapers, most of their central pages are full with acquisition or auction notices of real estate assets by the banks as well as financial institutions, that’s the real indicator (read as mirror) of our economy which is directly related with budget! Last but least, about finance to the real estate industry, there are special loan rates for housing finance but no such for the builder is the biggest joke regarding policies of FM towards real estate & yet we expect the homes to become affordable, just wow! To add there are policies like no GST for ready possession homes means to make people wait till the project gets completed making it costlier with the interest cost! I wonder if a layman like me can understand or see these hurdles in real estate, why can’t Hon FM & her team see it, is all I can say! If we really want to make homes affordable to all then the way hon FM has made provision to create a committee for improvements in banking, please make one such committee under herself or Hon PM for real estate or else every day millions of people sleep in homes which they don’t own but to wish to own someday, will remain a dram only for them!

To conclude about Union Budget 2026 from real estate’s view, I think we should change name of "Real" Estate to "Subka Real Estate” as then only we can have some hope for the real estate going by the tag line, i.e. “Subka" Sath "Subka" Vikas (I know it’s a PJ but that’s all I can think for now)..!!

Sanjay Deshpande

smd156812@gmail.com

Sanjeevani Dev.

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https://youtu.be/27j3I3rwGPQ?si=-ODYBxVI2Dl_C345

Please do visit my blog links below to read about real estate & home buying!

https://visonoflife.blogspot.com/2025/12/pune-real-estate-in-2026.html

https://jivnachadrushtikon.blogspot.com/2024/12/2025.html

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