J&K govt discards 'old structure' in new Budget

The Jammu & Kashmir government on Sunday unveiled a Rs 46,473-crore Budget packed with a slew of schemes for farmers, traders, women and employees while stamping out “Plan and non-Plan classification”.

The first Budget of the Peoples Democratic Party-Bharatiya Janata Party alliance government, led by Chief Minister Mufti Sayeed, projected a resource gap of Rs 4,336 crore, which it plans to finance with grants to state under the 14th Finance Commission grants without seeking any additional funding.

In the Budget speech, state Finance Minister Haseeb Drabu said: “This is not a good position to be in. In fact, if anything, it should be exactly the other way round. But there is no way I can help it as it is a legacy of the past 30 years if not more.”

Adding, “In 2015-16, the total public expenditure is budgeted to be Rs 46,473 crore. Of this Rs 11,246 crore is for building assets and infrastructure. The remaining Rs 35,227 crore is for current or revenue expenditure.”

Drabu said the broad thrust of the Budget was on revival of the state economy and it had discarded old Plan and non-Plan classification, while the focus was on a three-pronged initiative of “government, governance and changes”.

Following the replacement of the Planning Commission by the NITI (National Institution for Transforming India) Aayog and the acceptance of the 14th Finance Commission Award, Drabu said the state government had completely changed the structure of its Budget.

“J&K is perhaps the first state in the country to align its Budget to the changes in the federal fiscal system,” he said.

"The entire old classification of the plan and non-plan has been discarded. This is a major change which has far reaching implications on the allocation, efficiency and monitoring of public expenditure," he said.

"This change will demystify the budget to a great extent. Now there will be only two categories of expenditure, current and capital; the former being what is spent to meet our daily expenses and the latter is what is spent on making assets on the ground," he said.

"In the years to come, we can start the mapping of asset creation with money that has been spent. This was impossible in the earlier classification. In the next budget we will provide this House with the details of the physical assets that have been created on the ground by the money that was spent".