A city budget is a public document that the public cannot read. The failure is not vocabulary alone. It is structure. A resident who wants to know what happens to the bus, the drain and the school should not need a briefing from the person who wrote the annexure.
Officials answer that the numbers are all there. They are. They are arranged for the debate in the chamber, where a councillor is attacking or defending a department, not for the person who will stand in the wet lane the department has postponed. Those are different readers. Only one of them is treated as real.
What happens next
A readable budget is not a shorter budget. It is the same numbers with a page that says, in a sentence, what will be different on a named street by a named month. If that sentence cannot be written, the line item is not ready to be voted.
This is not a demand for simplicity that insults the work. It is a demand that the work show its face. The fare is collected in ordinary money. The explanation can survive ordinary language.
Taj Today will update this report if the official numbers or the timetable change. Related coverage stays on the Opinion page.
