Former Tamil Nadu Finance Minister and DMK leader P. T. R. Palanivel Thiagarajan has questioned whether current Finance Minister Marie Wilson personally drafted the Tamil Nadu government’s first Budget under the Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) government, suggesting that the minister struggled to read the speech because it may have been prepared by someone else, as reported in OneIndia Tamil.
Speaking to reporters at Chennai airport, Thiagarajan also criticised the practice of reading lengthy Budget speeches from printed papers and called for a rethink of how Budget presentations are made in the Assembly.
Thiagarajan had earlier announced that he would take a few months away from active politics following the DMK’s defeat in the Assembly elections. However, after recently paying respects at the statue of former Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi in Madurai on his death anniversary, he has returned to active political engagements.
His remarks come after expectations that he would comment on the first Budget presented by the TVK government.
‘I Wrote My Own Budget Speech’
Explaining how he handled the Finance portfolio during his tenure, Thiagarajan said he personally prepared his Budget speech and studied it before presenting it in the Assembly.
He said, “When I was the Finance Minister, I wrote the speech myself. I first wrote the Budget in English and then translated it into Tamil. After that, I read it twice before reading it in the Assembly.”
He added that he generally spoke without relying heavily on written material and could recall figures from memory.
“Mostly, I would speak without any paper 99% of the time. Even the statistics would be in my mind. If I had to speak for two hours, I could note down only the numbers and speak. That would naturally be something people could listen to,” he said.
Thiagarajan argued that simply reading a two-hour Budget speech from printed pages defeats the purpose of the exercise.
“If you read a two-hour Budget speech from printed paper, there is no use. Because it can easily be put on the internet. We can consider whether it is necessary to read the Budget speech for such a long time,” he said.
‘Officials Keep Repeating The Same Tradition’
The former Finance Minister also criticised what he described as a lack of fresh thinking among officials.
“Officials keep repeating the same tradition again and again, rather than thinking differently,” Thiagarajan said.
Taking a direct swipe at Wilson, he questioned whether the minister had actually written the Budget speech himself.
“In my estimation, this Budget could not have been written by this Finance Minister, Marie Wilson. There is difficulty because he is reading something that someone else has written and given to him,” he said.
Thiagarajan suggested that the government should reconsider the way Budget speeches are delivered in the Assembly.
“We should think about whether the method of reading the Budget should be changed,” he said.
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