The Appropriation (No. 4) Bill, 2011
Mr. Deputy Chairman, Sir, I am thankful to you for giving me this opportunity to speak on this Bill. Though we have definitely most experienced Finance Minister in the world, the present Government has presented three General Budgets but none of the Budgets has tried to give any direction to our economy, not to say about the supplementary
The Government is not able to tame the inflation and the common people of the country are/have been suffering from high inflation and skyrocketing prices.
Out of the additional expenditure proposed, 93 per cent is for non-Plan expenditure whereas a meagre four per cent is for creating durable capital assets; hence, 96 per cent is for revenue expenditure only.
Of the Supplementary Demands of Rs.63,180 crores, only ten per cent, i.e. Rs.6,330 crores, is proposed to be met through increased revenues while the rest 90 per cent will have to be necessarily borrowed. Thereby, it can have two undesirable consequences -- (i) increased in high interest rates, leading to higher inflation and (ii) sucking the liquidity from the market, thereby reducing the funds’ availability for investments. This eventually will lead the private sector to postpone the capital assets’ investments, which will automatically stagnate the Government revenues, and with continuous rise in non-Plan expenditure, the revenue and fiscal deficit will further rise and the country will be caught in the vicious circle of lower growth and rising fiscal deficits and Government debt.
We need to guard ourselves against such uncontrolled growth in public debt so that our country does not face the serious default situation as we have been seeing in the case of Greece, Italy and Spain.
To guard against this, I have two suggestions. If the Government is seeking supplementary grants in December, it means that a twelve months’ budgeted expenditure has been spent within eight months. Why should only the expenditure increase at all times? If the revenue is not growing and growth in some categories of expenditure is inevitable, why shouldn’t the Government plan and reduce expenditure under other heads well in advance, instead of approaching the Parliament for Supplementary Grants at the last minute?
The budgeted expenditure, this year, was over Rs.12 lakh crores. In making budgets for all large projects, it is a general practice that five per cent we normally keep as contingencies. Why not we start following the practice of keeping five cent as contingency for each head? And, thereby, it can be monitored in a better manner for avoiding this kind of last minute approaches.
The other subject is, we all know that agriculture is the backbone of our economy and about 70 per cent of the people are engaged in agricultural activities. But this Government, for some or
other reason, has not been able to do anything for the agriculture sector substantially.
There is no sustainable credit policy for the farmers and the cases of farmers’ suicide are/have been continuing. The main reason for farmers’ suicide is lack of credit, high rate of interest, non- availability of credit in time, and lack of other infrastructural facilities, though the Government has done so many studies for the infrastructure. Of course, State Governments are not in a position to provide any required benefits, financially, to the farmers. Thereby, a national fund is required to be created to address the problems of farmers. ... (Time-bell) ...
Even after 64 years of Independence, it is visible that governments after governments have been taking all actions only keeping in view to attract the voters and we are not able to develop any sustainable, long-term solutions.
