Budget to grow by Rs 50,000 crore, windfall for education

In a bid to secure Govt’s plans to reinvent India, Rs 50,000 crore more has been allocated for education, health, urban infrastructure and other core sectors. This increase, likely to be announced in Budget 2009-10, is over the Rs 2,85,000 crore plan allocation announced in the interim budget presented in February, reports Chetan Chauhan. The plan | Back from the brink

Updated on: Jun 13, 2009, 02:48:18 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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In a cementing of the government’s plans to reinvent India, Rs 50,000 crore more has been allocated for education, health, urban infrastructure and other core sectors.

This increase, likely to be announced in Budget 2009-10, is over the Rs 2,85,000 crore plan allocation announced in the interim budget presented in February.

Finance minister Pranab Mukerjee will present the budget in the first week of July.

Plan allocation is the budget portion that provides for new schemes and expenses in government programmes.

President Pratibha Patil, in her address to Parliament on June 4, had laid stress on education, health and urban infrastructure as the focus of the new UPA government.

A meeting of finance ministry and Planning Commission officials on Friday decided that a special allocation of Rs 8,500 crore would be made in the budget for setting up eight new Indian Institutes of Technologies and 16 new central universities announced by the government in 2008.

The total allocation for education is expected to be about Rs 49,500 crore — a four-fold increase since 2006-07.

In the interim budget, the sector had got Rs 34,000 crore.

The allocation for higher education would go up from last year’s Rs 11,340 crore to Rs 21,679 crore. The HRD ministry will also get Rs 7,000 crore more for setting up model schools and colleges in educationally backward areas and the expansion of the Sarva Siksha Abhiyan to the upper primary level.

“The proposed increases could mean a jump in fiscal deficit by 1 per cent,” said a senior government official. The interim budget had projected a fiscal deficit of 5.5 per cent.

Saumitra Chaudhuri, a Planning Commission member, said the fiscal deficit could be managed if government could generate resources through disinvestments. “Our revenue generation should improve with the economy showing signs of revival,” he said.

To give a boost to low-cost housing and modern public transport systems such as the Metro in urban areas, the government is set to increase the budget of the urban development ministry by about 80 per cent. The interim budget had allocated Rs 4,724 crore for the ministry. Allocations are likely to be increased for rural development and power.

Delhi will get Rs 2,000 crore for Commonwealth Games 2010 — up from the Rs 500 crore promised in the interim budget.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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