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Activists demand more from Budget for social schemes

TOI

  • 13th January 2016

NEW DELHI: As apprehended when many social sectors schemes were moved from the centre to the states following fiscal devolution to states, analysis of state budgets has revealed that overall allocation for many schemes such as Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), SABLA, Mid-Day Meal, and National Rural Drinking Water Programme have been adversely affected. This is despite the states now getting a greater share of taxes though with reduced central support for specific social schemes.

In this context, civil society groups working in various social sectors met the finance minister Arun Jaitley as part of the pre-budget consultation on Tuesday and urged greater allocation for social sector schemes by the centre.

After the changes in centre-state sharing of resources last year, the increased autonomy to states (in terms of the higher proportion of untied resources within their budgets) has been accompanied by substantial reductions in resource support to states for plan spending. While all States have gained more autonomy now in setting their budgetary priorities, some of the states such as, Bihar, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, are heavily dependent on central transfers for mobilizing resources for their state budgets. These also happen to be states with a stronger need for increasing public investment in social sectors, stated the submission of a coalition of around 400 civil society organisations from across the country working on budget related issues called People's Budget Initiative. They urged the union government to not reduce priority for social sector programmes in its budgets.

Preliminary analysis of some state budgets and supplementary budgets for 2015-16 indicated that states like Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Odisha gave greater priority (in terms of the share of the sector in the total state budget) for sectors like energy and public works. Of these, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra are not as heavily dependent on the centre for the state budget as they generate over 50% of the revenue themselves, said Subrat Das of Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability. The priority for rural development and panchayati raj appeared to have declined in the state budgets of Bihar, Chattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, he added.

About 20 civil society networks, groups and organisations took part in the pre-budget consultation and each was given five minutes to make presentations. They highlighted key priorities at the current juncture for sectors and issues ranging from agriculture, food security and social security for unorganized workers to education, health, drinking water and sanitation, among others. Along with seeking greater allocation for social sectors they gave a number of suggestions for enhancing transparency and accountability in public provisioning in these sectors and for special attention and adequate resources for vulnerable sections of the population.