Chhattisgarh CM Bhupesh Baghel sounds the Lok Sabha election bugle

Chhattisgarh government has announced abandoning 8,493 infrastructure projects

Hardly a month after assuming office, Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel was holding a meeting of bureaucrats when an important piece of news appeared on a local web portal.

The portal started running the story as “breaking news”. An official at the chief minister’s secretariat showed it to Baghel on the mobile phone. The chief minister stopped the proceedings.

“An important tip from the meeting has been leaked and if the practice continues, I will have to keep your mobile phones outside,” Baghel fumed. The state’s top officers, all IAS, remained thunderstruck in the rest of the meeting.

Baghel completes two months in office on February 17 after the Congress swept the state polls in November and bagged 68 of the 90 seats. During this period, a message he delivered loud and clear was that his government would not be bureaucrat-run. 

Baghel has emerged as a strict administrator. “I know how to take work from bureaucrats in the public interest,” he said. 

The chief minister has set his government’s priorities. With an eye on the Lok Sabha elections, he has reached out to the farmers and the middle class, who are on top in the list.

In the state Budget for 2019-20, Baghel doled out freebies worth more than Rs 20,000 crore for the farmers and the middle class. The prominent allocations include farm loan waiver, procuring paddy at a higher minimum support price(MSP), 35 kg rice per ration card to poor families, and no payment of electricity bills for those consuming up to 400 units of power.

The state government also returned the land acquired from tribals for setting up a 5.5-million-tonne per annum greenfield integrated steel plant of Tata Steel in the Bastar region.

While setting targets for bureaucrats, Baghel has put the BJP on the defensive mode by opening a series of investigations over alleged shady deals of the previous government. The prominent ones include the civil supplies corporation scam and the Jheeram Naxal incident, in which top leaders of the Congress were killed.

Indian Police Service (IPS) officer Mukesh Gupta, who was considered close to former chief minister Raman Singh, has been grilled by the economic offences wing.

“We are opening cases because the Congress promised in its election manifesto to unearth scams under BJP rule,” Baghel said. 

The state government has announced abandoning 8,493 infrastructure projects approved by the previous government. Baghel said the BJP government was in a hurry to announce and perform bhumi pujan (laying the foundation stone) for projects to gain political mileage. Without any criteria, infrastructure projects were approved before the model code of conduct came into effect for the assembly elections, held in November 2018.

The projects include minor and major ones. Many are near the completion stage also. “We will examine the projects and study their feasibility before taking decisions to revive them,” Baghel said.

The gross fiscal deficit in the Budget 2018-19 was estimated at Rs 9,998 crore before the Congress came to power. It has increased to Rs 18,768 crore, according to the revised estimates because the government waived farm loans of Rs 6,100 crore and increased the paddy MSP soon after assuming office. With no new tax and significant gains in income, the fiscal deficit in the state is unlikely to come down. 

Baghel is, however, confident. “With strict discipline and curtailing unnecessary expenses, we will bring down the fiscal deficit to 2.99 per cent in 2019-20.”