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Leader of the opposition in Telangana Assembly, K Jana Reddy, today alleged that both Telangana and Andhra Pradesh governments had inflated the figures of their respective maiden budgets by over Rs 50,000 crore.
The amount of central assistance being given under various schemes and the grants were shown far higher by them than the amount received under similar heads in the undivided AP. Also an increased budgetary support was shown in the name of public borrowings, which clearly surpassed the provisions of the FRBM Act, he argued while opening the discussion on Telangana Budget introduced last week.
In 2013-14, the government of undivided Andhra Pradesh had spent around Rs 1.51 lakh crore while the two states have raised their estimated budgetary expenditure for the 10-month period to over Rs 2.11 lakh crore by mostly inflating the numbers, he said
“How do we face the electorate and even the public representatives when they ask as to what happened to the money provided for various programmes in the Budget?” said Reddy. He said with just four months left in the fiscal, the government had no hopes of either raising the resources or spending on programmes according to the allocations.
In its Budget, the Telangana government has proposed to raise Rs 6,500 crore only through the sale of lands. “When the Congress government was not able to raise as much money in the entire tenure of 10 years from the sale of lands, how are you going to raise it in the next four months? It seems you had come out with this Rs 1-lakh-crore Budget as you want to match the figures of the AP government Budget,” he said.
Chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao tried to convince Reddy by explaining he had requested the Centre to relax the FRBM norms to raise the borrowing limit.
