PC's fiscal move: PM soothes ministries' ire

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has chipped in to end resistance from key ministries against finance minister P Chidambaram's fiscal consolidation move imposing restrictions on their expenditure kitty. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Jan 28, 2013, 01:07:19 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has chipped in to end resistance from key ministries against finance minister P Chidambaram's c move imposing restrictions on their expenditure kitty.

Chidambaram's ministry is not willing to increase the gross budgetary support (GBS) or plan size, over Rs 5,21,000 crore in 2012 budget, to keep fiscal deficit at 5.2%. Plan size is the money used to fund Central government schemes.

The GBS is the government spending on social sector schemes such as Bharat Nirman, rural employment guarantee and National Rural Health Mission. Besides, it includes Centre's assistance to various states.

The finance minister has made it clear to the Planning Commission, which allocates money to different ministries, that the GBS increase in the past few years was arbitrary and was a cause for fiscal mismanagement.

The ministry has suggested that the plan size should be just 10% of the revised budget estimate, which is around 20% less than the original allocation for the current financial year.

The decision has invoked a fury of angry representations from different ministries.

Government sources said that the PM had called plan panel deputy chairperson Montek Singh Ahluwalia and Chidambaram for a meeting on Friday evening to take a view on the plan size for 2013 budget.

Sources said that a decision to increase the plan size by 15% of the revised estimate was taken with the PM asking the plan panel to provide sufficient funds to certain ministries. This would include ministries which have prudently utilised the money given in the past year.

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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