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Bhubaneswar, Feb 16: Finance minister Pradip Amat Monday presented the state’s annual budget of Rs 84,487.77 crore for 2015-16 fiscal in the Orissa Assembly with special focus on farm output, investment in infrastructure, education, health and other prioritized sectors including poverty alleviation.
The finance minister said, “After the formation of the NITI Aayog, no clear picture has emerged on its powers to allocate funds, nor is there any indication about the level of Central assistance for state’s annual plan -2015-16. On receipt of indications about such financial implications, necessary adjustment will be made at the supplementary state.”
The complete annual budget, which is around Rs 4,400 crore more than that of previous year, has a Rs 43,956.32 crore non-plan outlay including a provision of Rs 16,778 crore towards salaries, Rs 8,593 crore towards pension, Rs 4,350 crore towards interest of payment and Rs 4,877 crore towards expenditure for maintenance of capital assets.
Likewise the budget also has a planned outlay of Rs 44,150 crore including `40,150 crore for government sector and `4,000 crore for the public sector undertakings. The budget estimation for Central plan and Centrally-sponsored plan was pegged at `349.55 crore and Rs 31.91 crore respectively.
“We propose to finance the budgeted outlay of expenditure in 2015-16 through estimated revenue receipts of Rs 70,940 crore, recovery of loans and advances of over Rs 240 crore and borrowing and other receipts of over `13,306 crore.”
Like previous years, the finance minister presented a separate budget for agriculture raising the outlay for the department from ` 9,542.22 crore in 2014-15 to Rs 10,903.62 crore in 2015-16.
“It is proposed to provide Rs 546.11 crore under Non-Plan and Rs 2,578.27 crore under plan for the year 2015-16. The total provision of Rs 3124.38 crore for 2015-16 is 14.53 per cent higher than the previous year,” Amat said.
Amat said the share of development expenditure has increased from 55.36 per cent in 2006-07 to 75.33 per cent in 2015-16.
Stating that his government will ensure favourable social and developmental outcome by alleviating poverty, eliminating illiteracy through quality education, affordable healthcare and social security, Amat said the budget outlay for the expenditure in social sector is proposed to be increased to Rs 29,092.19 crore this fiscal which is 8 per cent higher than the revised estimates for the year 2014-15.
