Chandigarh, February 28: Finance minister Manpreet Singh Badal presented a budget of Rs 1.54 lakh crore in the Punjab Assembly on Friday. This is the fourth budget presented by him for the Capt Amarinder Singh-led government.
Budget highlights:
- Rural development gets Rs 3,830 crore and urban development gets Rs 5,026 crore.
- FM says that 16 state government departments have prepared a 4-year strategic action plan and release of funds to these departments will be based on this.
- The FM said the budget focuses on Agriculture and Education, which have received the maximum allocations.
- The allocation for the Agriculture sector is Rs 12,526 crore, and for the Education sector is 13,092 crore.
- Rs 4,675 crore allocation for the health sector
- Punjab’s Gross State Domestic Product (GSDP) would increase from Rs 5.74 lakh crore to Rs 6.44 lakh crore in 2020-21.
- Punjab’s revenue receipts have increased by 18.96 percent from 2019-2020 to 2020-21.
- Punjab has given Rs 10,530 crore as debt servicing till March this year, against the legacy food credit account of Rs 31,000 crore.
- FM says GSDP ratio reduced from what was inherited from the previous government (42.75 per cent) to 39.83 per cent. He says this will be further reduced to 38.53 percent by March 2021.
- Government has been able to save Rs 49 crore in three years.
- Badal said that there was a funding gap of over Rs 10,000 crore in the budget in 2017. The funding gap in 2019 was 2,323 crore. He said that the gap has been reduced to zero this year. This has been possible after the year 2006.
- FM says that the state has been in primary surplus this year.
- FM has increased the expenditure on salaries and pensions by Rs 4,000 crore. This is mainly to account for releasing the pending arrears of DA and for the new pay scales to be announced.
- 6 per cent of DA arrears will be released within next week. The pay commission report will be implemented and has been accounted for in the budget.
- Revenue receipts for 2020-21 will be Rs 95,716 crore, up from Rs 73,975 crore in 2019-2020.
- No CLU to be charged from investors for the next two years.
- A Rural Development fund fee and market committee fee ( currently a total of four per cent) to be reduced to just one per cent.
- Farm labourers will get Rs 520 crore for debt relief in 2020-21.
- Punjab’s debt is expected to go up to a whopping Rs 2.48 lakh crore by March 2021.
- FM announced that the retirement age of employees will once again be reduced to 58, withdrawing the practice of giving extension in service. He says this will enable the government to recruit youth.
Just as the announcement for the Budget proposals were to begin in the Punjab Assembly, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Brahm Mohindra moved a resolution saying that SAD MLAs indulged in a breach of privileges, by preventing Manpreet Badal from coming to the Assembly.
Speaker Rana K P Singh said that this was violative of the privilege granted to members. He ordered that the matter be referred to the special privileges committee of the House.
Earlier, the Punjab Assembly was adjourned for 20 minutes after Finance Minister Manpreet Badal, who was slated to present the budget at 11 am, failed to arrive in the assembly following a protest outside his house by SAD MLAs.
Badal arrived in the Assembly minutes after the adjournment.
Mohindra informed the Assembly that SAD MLAs were staging a dharna outside Badal’s houase and sought a privilege motion against the MLAs.
Mohindra said the entry to Badal’s house had been blocked and the situation had turned “ugly” as even the Chandigarh police could not manage to evict the protesting MLAs.
Earlier AAP MLAs staged a dharna outside the Punjab assembly.
They alleged that the Congress and the SAD had colluded in cases related to illegal sand mining and faulty power purchase agreements with private thermal plants.
