The taxpayer had no more money.

"If the government's off-budget liabilities (or withheld payments) are taken into account, the central government's real fiscal deficit could end up being as high as 5.5% of gross domestic product (GDP) in the current financial year, a Mint analysis of public accounts suggests," wrote Nikita Kwatra. India's GDP is around $2.8 trillion, which is around Rs 199 trillion at Rs 71 to the dollar. At 5.5% of GDP, the fiscal deficit comes to around Rs 11 trillion. The total expenditure proposed for the Budget of 2019-20 was Rs 27,86,349 crore, or Rs 27.86 trillion, which means fiscal deficit is 39% of our budget. In the last financial year the government proposed to borrow Rs 6.24 trillion, "More than 92% of this amount would be spent on paying interest on the already running loans on the government." Interest payment is about 40% of government revenue. Increasing fiscal deficit is only going to add to interest outgo. Analysis of revenue data shows that 53% of total revenue is collected by November, so "Going by that trend, total revenue receipts this year should at best be close to Rs 18.4 trillion, falling short of budgeted Rs 19.6 trillion by Rs 1.2 trillion," wrote Kwatra. Disinvestment, or sale of assets, will fall short by "40% or about Rs 42,000 crore (Rs 420 billion)". "There are eight regional economies that are growing faster than India is at this point in time, including China, Cambodia, Indonesia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Vietnam, Bangladesh and Nepal," wrote N Rajadhyaksha. Couple of days back the International Monetary Fund (IMF) cut India's GDP growth rate further to 4.8% for this year. "There is no country that has slowed down as sharply as India since 2017, by 2.2 percentage points." "India's domestic air passenger traffic growth traffic growth slowed to 3.74% in 2019, from 18.60% in 2018, amid a subdued economy and the grounding of Jet Airways (India) Ltd." If people cannot afford to fly they cannot afford to buy new cars either. "The number of registrations of vehicles at regional transport offices (RTOs), which is a proxy for retail sales, slid 15% in December from a year ago. The decline was on already low base since the ongoing sales slowdown had already started showing its effects by December 2018." Air travel and cars attract humongous taxes, so if people are not buying these tax collections are bound to drop. Only China has a fiscal deficit higher than the 5% rate of India. "China aside, most of the other regional Asian economies that have been considered in this analysis run relatively tight budgets, ranging from the Philippines (1.1%) and Cambodia (1.3%) to Vietnam (4.4%) and Bangladesh (4.8%)," wrote Rajadhyaksha. They have more space to increase spending to stimulate growth if needed. Politicians think taxpayer money belongs to them. The taxpayer has no more.