Budget proposals get House nod

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, June 22

The Vidhan Sabha today cleared Budget proposals worth Rs 1.18 lakh crore by passing the Punjab Appropriation Bill, 2017.

Concluding the discussion today, Finance Minister Manpreet Singh Badal said the government would get a third-party audit done on the Rs 31,000-crore loan taken by the previous government to settle the legacy food credit account.

He also said misappropriation in the allotment of tenders for creating food storage facilities in the past 10 years needed to be looked into.

Manpreet said the issue of Rs 10,000-crore gap in what the government earned and what it spent would be filled by additional resource mobilisation and the additional income coming from the GST rollout, besides plugging loopholes in tax collection.

He said the schemes announced for socially and economically backward classes would be applicable to the Muslims as well.

Explaining that his Budget figures were factual and no attempt had been made to inflate the same, the minister said the debt to gross state domestic product (GSDP) ratio had increased from the projected 2.88 to 13.89 in the revised estimates for the last fiscal.