The central government is considering moving towards pre-pandemic levels of annual bond market borrowings as one of the ways to prioritise progressively lower debt-to-GDP ratio over fiscal deficit targets, a finance ministry official said. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in her Budget speech on July 23 reiterated the Centre’s commitment to scale down the fiscal deficit target to below 4.5 percent of the GDP by 2025-26 and added that from 2026-27, the endeavour will be to keep the deficit such that debt as a percentage of GDP will be on a declining path. This means that the new medium-term fiscal consolidation path has been linked to a reduction in the debt-to-GDP ratio instead of merely focusing on progressively targeting a narrower fiscal deficit target.