Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia recently said that the exercise of producing an annual 'outcome budget' for union ministries should be scrapped. In which financial year was the 'Outcome Budget' first presented by the Finance Minister of India?

Outcome budgets are progress reports of Ministries on what they have done with the money allocated to them in the national budget that is presented in parliament each year. It helps in the evaluation of various schemes and improvement in their delivery. Introduced during 2005-06, the outcome budget was meant to be a tool to discipline all Ministries in terms of how and when they spend their allocated money, and ensure that expenditures were not staggered towards the last quarter of the fiscal.