The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance has “strongly disapproved” of the government’s proposed move to transfer the task of planning and approving plan expenditure to the Finance Ministry.
The Committee has recommended that the Ministry of Planning be entrusted with the role until an alternate mechanism is put in place.
“…given the mandate and approach of the Ministry of Finance, the proposed planning and approval of Plan expenditure would invite the conflict of interest and is likely to result in a cutting down of genuine/adequate allocation of funds to Plan Schemes especially social welfare schemes in order to contain fiscal deficit,” cautioned the Committee’s report, tabled in Parliament on Tuesday. The Committee, chaired by Congress leader Veerappa Moily, also censured the Finance Ministry for “reducing the budgeting exercise to a ritual.”
The Department of Economic Affairs has not taken corrective measures to arrest the imbalance between Budget Estimates (BE), Revised Estimates (RE) and Actual expenditure, the report said.
“Such a recurring trend has obviously reduced the budgeting exercise to a ritual…The reasons advanced by the Department are rather routine and thus not very convincing.”
The Committee also reported that against suggested economy measures for bringing down the expenses related to the preparation of the union budget — such as eliminating the duplication in documents —the Finance Ministry has merely reduced the number of printed copies.
The Committee had recommended that the Ministry use information technology to present a paperless and more user-friendly budget. For this, it had pointed out that the budget document titled “Statement of Revenue Forgone” was a mere production of the contents of Annexure 15 to another budget document titled “Receipts Budget.”
In its written reply to the Committee, though the Ministry agreed the two sets amounted to duplication of information, it said it would consider eliminating printing of duplicate documents from future budgets.
As an economy measure, it said, however, it had reduced the number of copies of budget documents from 1,49,300 in 2011-12 to 1,09,800 in 2014-15.
