India, Jan. 31 -- The budget speech by the finance minister in Lok Sabha is usually the most followed part of any budget. It gives a big-picture view of the spending plans of the government for the following year, programmes and schemes it proposes to launch in the course of the year and changes in taxes it intends to make. But there is more to the budget than the speech. The nitty-gritty of the budget can be found in about a dozen documents that are laid on the table of the house soon after the speech is read. We explain what to look for in these documents to understand the budget better.

The speech read out in Parliament is divided into two parts. The government uses Part A to talk about its vision, plans to launch new programmes, allo...