Haryana outlay up 12.6%, no new taxes

Naveen S Garewal

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, March 9 

No new taxes, Haryana Finance Minister Capt Abhimanyu today presented a Budget pegged at a record Rs 1,15,198.29 crore for the 2018-19 fiscal, an increase of 12.6 per cent over the Budget last year (2017-18). Targeting revenue receipts of Rs 76,933.02 crore, the state will spend Rs 85,186.53 crore during 2018-19. There will be a revenue deficit of Rs 8,253.51 crore.

(Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd)

The Budget clearly focuses on agriculture with a 51 per cent increase in allocation, that also includes Haryana Kissan Pradhikaran. The aim is to make agriculture more sustainable. The minister’s Budget speech lasted over 96 minutes. With Assembly elections only a year away, he announced Rs 100 crore for the SYL canal and said the allocation could be raised to Rs 1,000 crore, if need be. 

A sum of Rs 44,911.16 crore has been allocated for schemes to attain 15 “sustainable development goals” as envisaged by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). This makes Haryana the first and the only state in the country to follow the UNDP socio-economic parameters for development over the next 15 years. These clearly specify that all future budgetary allocations to departments will be performance-based.

On the flip side, the state’s debt liability, that was Rs 70,931 crore in 2014-15 when the BJP government came to power, has gone up by 127 per cent to Rs 1,61,159 crore. The government has launched a cashless medical  scheme for government employees and pensioners for which the upper limit of Rs 5 lakh per admission has been done away with.

An asset management cell has been created to identify government properties within and outside the state. A non-banking finance company — Haryana State Financial Services Ltd — has been set up for managing surplus funds of public enterprises.