State & financial health
- Hueiyen Lanpao Editorial :: July 06 2015 -
Chief Minister O Ibobi on the floor of Assembly is reported to have claimed that his government is maintaining sound financial discipline and Manipur is among the best in the Northeast as far as maintaining this trend goes.
Whether or not one takes the Chief Minister’s claim seriously, the recent audit report of the Comptroller and Auditor general (CAG) of India has shown that all is not well as made out to be.
On revenue receipts, the State saw an increase of Rs 463.03 crore in 2013-14 over the previous year. The report says that the increase was mainly due to increase of Grants-in-Aid from the Government of India amounting to Rs. 173.96 crore in 2013-14 over the previous year.
The expenditure status during 2013-14 increased by Rs 189.37 crore from the previous year. However, capital ex penditure which leads to creation of assets is showing a declining trend since 2010-11 and revenue expenditure has increased steadily during 2009-14.
Revenue expenditure as a percentage of the total expenditure increased from 65.40% in 2009-10 to 81.57% in 2013-14. CAG says this indicated that the major portion of expenditure is increasingly being spent on meeting “maintenance expenses, salary/debt servicing, etc.”
The CAG has correctly advised that the State government could ensure that financial surplus is not achieved at the cost of restricting Capital expenditure as such the trend of diminishing Capital expenditure could adversely affect the long term economic health of Manipur by restricting investment and infrastructural creation.
On financial management and budgetary control, the CAG report said that during 2013-14, an expenditure of Rs 7555.33 crore was incurred against a total budget provision of Rs 9976 crore resulting in overall saving of Rs 2420.83 crore.
The report remarked that supplementary provision aggregating to Rs 155.50 crore in 17 cases during the year proved “unnecessary” as expenditure did not come up to the level of original provision.
CAG cited four cases wherein unnecessary supplementary provision provided exceeded Rs 10 crore.
These departments were Police Department (Rs 31.85 crore); Tribal Affairs and Hills Department (Rs 26.86 crore); Social Welfare Department (Rs. 13.13 crore); under revenue account and Social Welfare Department (Rs 44.98 crore) under Capital account.
Thereafter, the CAG advised that the State government could consider timely regularisation of excess expenditure which is pending regularisation as required under the Constitution besides strengthening budgetary control to avoid cases of expenditure without provision.
What has been highlighted here is just part of the CAG report. With such reports every year, the average citizen in the State is not sure how the Government intends to put in place a mechanism to kick start maintaining financial discipline while there seems to be an everyday naturalisation of aberrations and anomalies.
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