Bhubaneswar: Feb 28: After the Panchayat Election debacle, State government has tried to keep the people happy with its annual budget for the financial year 2017-18 as it has lot of promises for both rural and urban people. State Finance Minister Pradip Amat presented the annual budget of Rs.1, 06,911 crore in the state assembly on Monday and said, state can at best arrange around 89,000 cr and rest to be borrowed, which will increase state’s loan burden to nearly Rs.78,000 cr. For its revenue, state has to depend on its share in central taxes to the tune of Rs.31,422 cr and about Rs.21,210 cr as grant-in-aid from centre. State’s own taxes as estimated will be arount Rs.26,800 cr. The administrative expenditure as estimated will be Rs.47,465 cr. Out of which, Rs.22,000 cr will be spent towards salaries, Rs.11,313 cr towards pension, Rs.5000 cr towards interest payment and Rs.5177 cr towards maintenance of capital assets. The budget has its focuss on Education and Skill development, for which the spend will be Rs.18,404 cr. Out of which, Rs.2000 cr on Sarva Sikshya Abhijaan, Rs.860 cr for mid-day meals, Rs.706 cr for Rashtiya Madhyamik Sikshya Abhijan. The budget has also targeted to provide quality skill training to 8 lakh youths in 5 years and for which 100 cr has been earmarked in the budget.
The budget has allocated Rs.4478 cr for urban development department, which was only Rs.3357 in last fiscal year. Government has introduced a new scheme ‘Unnatti’ for improving the urban roads and Rs.294 cr will be spent for this and Rs.392 cr has been allocated for different projects of smart city Bhubaneswar and Rourkela.
For Agriculture and allied sector, a separate budget has been prepared as earlier years and total spend will be Rs.14,930 cr as against the last year allocation of Rs.13118 cr. Around Rs.15,844 crore was allocated to the rural and panchayatraj department. The budget has also proposed a corpus of Rs.300 cr for timely payment of wages under MGNREGA. Budget of Rs.300 cr has been earmarked for MAMATA, a scheme for providing cash to pregnant women. Finance Minister launched a new scheme ‘ABADA’ aiming to transform Puri into a world class heritage city with an allocation of Rs.100 cr.
