5.8% more for social sector

Bowing to pressure from his colleagues, finance minister P Chidambaram has reportedly agreed to a meager hike of 5.8% or Rs 30,000 crore in money for welfare measures in next fiscal as compared to the funds provided for the same in the current financial year.

Updated on: Feb 20, 2013, 21:49:44 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Bowing to pressure from his colleagues, finance minister P Chidambaram has reportedly agreed to a meager hike of 5.8% or Rs 30,000 crore in money for welfare measures in next fiscal as compared to the funds provided for the same in the current financial year.

The increase would, however, be lowest in nine years of the UPA government and comes at the time when economy is struggling to revive.

Chidambaram's intention to walk the talk on fiscal discipline by controlling expenses had run into stiff resistance from ministerial colleagues including rural development minister Jairam Ramesh and defence minister AK Antony, who wanted substantial increase to push government's social inclusion programme during the crucial election year.

The finance minister initially wanted to increase the funding by around 15% of the revised budget estimate for 2012-13 but after deliberations at the highest level in the government he has told the Planning Commission to increase funding based on the original budget estimate.

The government's support to the central plan is called the gross budgetary support, or the GBS.

For 2012-13, the GBS was originally pegged at Rs 5,21,000 crore, which later was slashed by 20% or to around Rs 4,16,000 crore in the revised estimate.

The money for welfare measures is funded almost equally from government's own accounts or the annual budget and the resources that flow in from public enterprises.

Liming the flow for GBS helps the government to keep a tap on fiscal deficit, which the finance minister wants to keep below 5.3% of the Gross Domestic Product.

The increase, government sources, said was in line with the UPA's priority to health, education and environment sectors in the 12th five year, which implementation would start from next financial year.

As a result, the panel panel, which allocated funds to ministries on GBS decided by the finance ministry, has indicated at a "good" increase in funding for ministries such as agriculture, education, water and health. But, rural development and economic ministries are likely to face a cut for fiscal prudency.

Government sources said that the allocation for the HRD ministry is expected to be increased by Rs 4,500 crore from Rs 61,407 crore provided in the last budget with increased focus on improving quality of higher education.

The health ministry is expected to get additional Rs 2,500 crore to strengthen public health measures including providing free generic medicines through government hospitals.

The water resources ministry is expected to get maximum increase of about 10% to supplement the agriculture sector, for which the government would be providing about 1,500 crore more.

The rural development ministry would face a budget cut of about Rs 1,000 crore despite Ramesh seeking Congress president Sonia Gandhi's intervention to prevent fund pruning.

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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