Plan panel has no role in NDA’s 2014-15 budget

The country’s top advisory and fund allocation body, the Planning Commission, will virtually have no role to play in the first budget of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government — a signal of its diminishing role.

Updated on: Jun 24, 2014, 16:59:01 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The country’s top advisory and fund allocation body, the Planning Commission, will virtually have no role to play in the first budget of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government — a signal of its diminishing role.

The government has decided that the finance ministry will appraise the financial proposals of the central ministries for allocation of funds to them in the 2014-15 budget to be presented in the second week of July.

A senior government official said that directions were issued recently that the ministries should submit their budget allocation proposals directly to the finance ministry instead of routing it through the planning panel.

Since the panel came into being in 1950, the commission used to decide overall plan expenditure of the central government, called the gross budgetary support, in consultation with the finance ministry.

With the money in its kitty, the panel examines proposals of all central ministries and based on that, decides the annual budget of each ministry.

For this year’s budget, the finance ministry issued a circular on June 3 asking the ministries to submit the proposals to the budget division. It also set a deadline of June 19 to submit the proposals for inclusion in the budget.

A plan panel official had a counter argument saying that the government has not appointed the deputy chairperson and members of the commission and therefore, the appraisal process cannot be done.

“It is the deputy chairperson who interacts with the finance minister on budget issues. Without him, the process cannot take place,” the official said.

The government officials said the finance ministry is expected to allocate funds to each ministry based on the priorities enlisted in the President’s address to Parliament last week.

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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