How Indian Netizens talked about Union Budget 2019 – A Data Analysis

Reading Time: 5 mins

Key findings

• Google Trends data about the “Budget” topic indicate lower interest around Union Budget over the last 2 years.
• Surprisingly, netizens’ interest around the Interim Budget in February this year was higher than the actual Budget in July.
• Natural to Twitter, the activity for Budget spiked at the start of the Budget announcement and crashed after a few hours.
• #EconomicSurvey2019 was the only hashtag that made it to the top 5 trending hashtags on Twitter India on 5th July 2019.

Idea

The Union Budget 2019-20 was presented on 5th July by Finance Minister, Nirmala Sitharaman. Gramener’s monthly Data Storytelling Hackathon was on 12th July. Team SentiBudget comprising Kriti Rohilla, Lakshya Bhatia and Sundeep Reddy Mallu decided to use the budget announcement as the theme for the data story for the Hackathon.

One might say, but what could possibly be new or different in the budget announcement, it happens every year after all. Our focus was not on the contents of the budget or the various programs that were talked about. We wanted to understand how Indian Netizens talk about Budget on digital platforms.

We settled on observing trends on Google and Twitter related to budget 2019 announcement and decided to narrate a story on the same.

• Google Trends for the reach of Google’s mindshare among netizens.
• Twitter for the specific purpose of looking at a closed digital platform where users have to explicitly sign up to engage.
• Newspapers and digital news sites discuss the budget at great length.

The question we wanted to answer – Do Indian Netizens engage on Budget the same way citizens engage on non-digital platforms?

Budget trends on Google Search

The picture below represents the occurrence of the word budget or the like on Google Search Engine using Google Trends. Google Trends is a service by Google that analyzes the popularity of search queries in Google Search across various regions and languages. Based on the topic or term used for search it aggregates all such queries that were served by Google search. 

For the sake of our analysis, we picked up the Budget topic as a whole. Here it shows search made by users for 30 days before the budget announcement. As it is evident from the graph, the only day when people showed some curiosity is on the day of the announcement.

Google trends search results for Budget topic from:

1. June to July 2019, and
2. January to July 2019

Then we made a similar observation for a period of 90 days and guess what, the excitement for interim budget announced on Feb 1, 2019, gained more traction than on the actual budget date i.e. July 5, 2019. Google trends showed very similar results for both, the usage of the budget as a topic and budget as a term by Netizens.

Even so, the activity of Google users relating to budget on google search has been declining ever since 2017. The increasing number of mobile applications for news that provide fleeting information every so often can be one reason why people don’t turn into Google to do a manual search.

Budget trends on Twitter

Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms. Every day millions of users express their opinion on an extensive range of topics. India is a country of more than a billion people. Many Indians use Twitter on a regular basis to voice their opinions. The Union Budget announcement is of huge significance to every section of society. Keeping these facts in mind, one might expect a lot of excitement among Twitteratis on the announcement of budget 2019. The reality, however, is far from the expected. 

Twitter users put hashtags in their tweets to categorize them in a way that makes it easy for other users to find and follow tweets about a specific topic or theme. For topics relating to budget, users were using hashtags like

• #BudgetForNewIndia,
• #Budget2019,
• #Economy,
• #EconomicSurvey2019 etc.
• Other Popular mentions on Twitter

Surprisingly, for the entire week of the budget announcement, not even one budget-related hashtag made it to the list of trending hashtags. Even on the 5th, only two hashtags namely #EconomicSurvey2019 and #देशकाबजट were among the popular ones. 

We then scraped tweets based on hashtags and keywords relating to budget based on tweets from prominent twitters. The collected data comprised of a little over 17k tweets.

During the same week, Pakistan also presented its Union Budget. It caused a little unwanted noise in our data. We segregated Pakistan budget tweets from Indian budget reaction tweets by using a supervised learning-based classifier.

The classifier used a set of 800 tweets that were manually categorized as India Budget and Pakistan Budget tweets. The cleaned data gave us insights about the user handles who were actively tweeting on budget and how their tweets were received by the public. It also showed that people expressed more engagement on this topic with the prime minister and the finance minister. 

In the last 2 years, there has been a clear rise in Twitter activity when it comes to expressing thoughts regarding the Indian budget. In comparison, Google searches regarding the Indian budget have been declining.

Conclusion

India Netizens were less interested in Union Budget 2019. This trend was stark on Twitter, seems like an entirely different country altogether. In the case of Google Search trends, Union Budget was no match for the ICC World Cup that was going on at the same time. No wonder we are a cricket crazy nation :-).