Centre cannot throttle us, says Bengal FM Mitra amid political slugfest

Amid the political slugfest between the Centre and the West Bengal government over the Covid-19 investigation team, state Finance Minister Amit Mitra has said West Bengal will not accept anything against federal principles, and "will not be throttled".
 

In an interview to Karan Thapar for The Wire, Mitra said the decision to send two inter-ministerial Central teams to West Bengal without consulting the state government was a breach of protocol because it was not in keeping with the spirit of cooperation needed in a federal polity.
 

Mitra said the state government could not understand why districts like Kalimpong or Jalpaiguri had been chosen. Neither in terms of the number of cases nor in terms of the rate of increase — the two criteria specified by the Centre — was their inclusion justified.

Gujarat and Ahmedabad, in particular, had far larger numbers and a greater rate of increase but were not chosen.
 

Questioned about the complaint that West Bengal was not testing enough, he said this was because many of the kits initially received by the state were faulty, a fact now confirmed on a national basis by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR).
 

Mitra rejected the suspicion that the audit committee appointed to determine whether deaths were caused by Covid-19 or co-morbidities would hide coronavirus deaths.
 

On West Bengal's financial differences with the Centre, Mitra said he had written eight letters to Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman but received no response.

Only a small part of one of the state's four or five key requests had been agreed to - the permission to extend the Ways and Means allowance to 60 per cent of the March 31 limit. The state had asked for it to be doubled. The difference, Mitra said, was about Rs 1,500 crore but it had been refused.
 

Mitra was particularly upset about the Centre's failure to respond to two requests.
 

First, the request made by the chief minister directly to the prime minister to increase the borrowing limit of the states under the FRBM rules to 5 per cent, from the present 3 per cent.
 

Second, the request for a nine-month moratorium on repaying loans and interest. He said, as a result, this year, when the pandemic was raging and the lockdown crippling the economy, West Bengal would still have to allocate Rs 56,000 crore for debt servicing.
 

Mitra said the central government must come up with a package of 6 per cent of GDP (around Rs 10 trillion). Pointing out that this was not a time to worry about the fiscal deficit, he said “it's a question of survival” and the finance minister “must come out of the crease and cross-bat.” The deficit, he added, can be monetised by the Reserve Bank of India.