Maiden budget

The 22-day old PDP-BJP coalition Government presented it maiden budget for the financial year 2015-16 in the State Legislature. Finance Minister Haseeb Drabu claimed that he had given theoretical as well as practical reorientation to the annual budget with the sole aim of making it people-friendly. He proposes to abolish the plan and non-plan system and replace it with current and capital expenditure. He extensively dealt with income-expenditure details for the fiscal year under consideration. With total expenditure budgeted at Rs 46,473 crore and receipts at Rs 42,137 crore the state is left with a gap of Rs 4336 crore, which will be financed by prepositioning of 14th Finance Commission grants without seeking any additional funding.
The most significant part of the budget is the multisided relief given to the flood sufferers of September 8, 2014. The Finance Minister has proposed vast exemption from payment of taxes, VAT, electric tariff, and many other recurring charges till the end of financial year 2015.
Though the Finance Minister has not promised any substantial relief to the huge unemployed segment of society, yet he proposed that the self employment alternative had to be strengthened and diversified so that dependence on Government employment would be reduced.
The budget brought good news to Government employees who would get 17 percent of pending Dearness Allowance to be credited to their GP Fund but paid in cash after April 1, 2015. In the case of pensioners, they would get the arrears in cash. A very significant scheme which the Finance Minister has proposed is to safeguard the future of girl child for the reason that the gender discrimination is increasing in an alarming proportion and it needs to be set right. The Finance Minister has proposed a very healthy  and appreciable plan of sanctioning Rs. 1000 per month in favour of each girl child from 6-10 years of age till  21 years so that by that time she has 6.5 lakh rupees that would give her support for marriage or education and training. In the same way aged women would be provided with financial support of Rupees 50,000 for detection and prevention of disease.
The one segment that has been left in rather despair is 61000 casual employees whose regularization has not gone through owing to financial constraints as per the Finance Minister. It was expected that their case would be considered with sympathy.
The proposal of Finance Minister for outsourcing the toll collection at Lakhanpur will become a debatable issue. The main motivation for the Finance Minister has been to eradicate corruption as it was generally believed that this service generated corruption and inefficiency. However, if outsourcing the service we are able to induct creditable agency to take care of things that would be helpful.
The internally displaced Pandits might get some solace from the decision of the Finance Minister to unfold the plan of establishing model ethnographic and cultural villages beginning with the first ever such village of Kashmiri Pandits. He did not make any mention of the modus operandi of establishing such a village and the resources that would be made available to the community to settle down there.
The budget does not propose any major tax or hike in tax in essential goods. As such it can be called a moderate budget though except for the distressed people no big relief seems to accrue to the broad masses of people.  A major proposal has been comprehensive transformation of all 19 Public Sector Enterprises (PSEs) by drawing them out of the ambit of different administrative departments and bring them under one managerial and administrative basket for holistic corporatization and financial restructuring. This goes as one of the facets of a changed approach to the budgeting policy.  However, industrial policy has been kept in abeyance for some time and also about the financial support to the Numbrdars and Chowkidars, a committee would be formed to give its expert opinion of how this could be settled.
In final analysis the budget does not make any tall claims nor does it announce and exciting and ambitious schemes but is fully conscious of the financial burden which the State has to bear in given circumstances.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here