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In run-up to 2027, UP Budget may have larger chunk for ongoing projects

Presiding over a meeting convened to step up preparations for the annual budget, Yogi Adityanath asked his team to focus on public welfare, development and financial discipline in the state’s annual budget

Published on: Jan 30, 2026, 07:16:10 IST
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LUCKNOW As the Yogi 2.0 government prepares to table its last annual budget (2026-2027) on February 11, it faces a dual task – providing additional funds to complete ongoing projects, implement the chief minister’s announcements, and curate a populist narrative ahead of the 2027 UP Assembly elections. The primary challenge lies in balancing ‘people-oriented’ spending with the state’s commitment to fiscal discipline.

The state government had presented an annual budget of  ₹8.08 lakh crore for 2025-2026. (Pic for representation)
The state government had presented an annual budget of ₹8.08 lakh crore for 2025-2026. (Pic for representation)

While chief minister Yogi Adityanath can leverage supplementary budgets later in the year to maintain momentum, the government is now in a high-stakes race against time to fulfill existing promises and ensure that long-standing schemes are fully operational before the polls.

As the state government gives final touches to its annual budget, all eyes will be on the allocation of funds to UP in the Union Budget that finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman will present in the Parliament February 1. The state government will make needful changes in making allocations to various schemes in UP to ensure that matching funds for the central schemes, as may be announced in the Union Budget, are available.

Presiding over a meeting convened to step up preparations for the annual budget, Yogi Adityanath asked his team to focus on public welfare, development and financial discipline in the state’s annual budget. The state government, which began preparations for the budget in the third quarter of 2025-2026, continues doing so to spur growth amid the challenges of next- gen GST reforms. UP finance minister Suresh Khanna has time and again asserted that the state government’s tax collections would continue to grow as people would spend more following the overhaul in GST structure.

The state government had presented an annual budget of 8.08 lakh crore for 2025-2026. It presented (December 2025) a supplementary budget for 24,496.98 crore. Efforts are now underway to ensure that most of the funds earmarked in the annual budget and the supplementary budget are used before the closing of the financial year on March 31 and make a visible impact of government schemes on the ground for greater connect with people.

As the state government aims at making UP a $1-trillion economy by 2029-2030, the chief minister has consistently been monitoring the progress made to achieve this objective. He is also monitoring the implementation of government schemes along with utilisation of budgetary funds.

The state government had requested the National Statistical Commission (NSC) to bring out a needful amendment to the methodology to work out the gross state domestic product (GSDP) of UP. The NSC assured that needful changes would be made in the methodology by February 2026. The state government hopes that UP’s GST, which reached 29.6 lakh crore at the end of 2024-2025, would go up substantially when calculated with new methodology.

  • Umesh Raghuvanshi
    ABOUT THE AUTHOR
    Umesh Raghuvanshi

    Umesh Raghuvanshi is an award-winning journalist with nearly four decades of demonstrated experience in the profession. He is the author of Ayodhya: The Gods Are Liberated. He is skilled in storytelling and newswriting, and writes on politics, governance, legislature, finance, environment, and social issues. He is based in Lucknow, is well-travelled, and has covered several national and international events, as well as all assembly and parliament elections in Uttar Pradesh since 1984. He has been a visiting scholar at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley, USA, and a Metcalf Fellow at the Metcalf Institute of Marine and Environmental Reporting, University of Rhode Island, USA. He is a science graduate from DBS College, Dehradun, and holds an MA in Political Science from DAV (PG) College, Dehradun. He won the KC Kulish International Merit Award for excellence in journalism (2015) and received it in New Delhi in 2017. He also won a competition organised by the United Nations Environment Programme DTIE OzonAction Programme in 2009 that assessed coverage of the interlinkages between ozone and climate change. He was awarded in Beijing, China, in 2010. He started his career with a Dehradun-based English daily in the early 1980s and later worked with The Pioneer too.Read More