Post News Network
Bhubaneswar, Sept 1: The state has not diverted a single penny from the capital receipts including borrowed fund to meet deficit in revenue account during last 10 years on the back of sound macroeconomic fundamentals of the state. Rather, all capital receipts were utilized in generating productive capital assets, a state government document said.
“Ideally, the capital receipts including borrowing should be utilized to generate assets to ensure income for the state government. However, persistence of deficit in the revenue account of the state for a long period had compelled the state government to divert the borrowed funds from capital account to meet the revenue deficit in the past years,” it said.
“In the early eighties, this diversion was negligible or there was no such diversion of capital receipts to meet the revenue deficit. However, this diversion reached an alarming level of 77.31 per cent in the year 1998-99. However, since 2005-06, the entire borrowed fund is utilized for capital spending,” it added.
As per the statistics given, 2004-05 was the last time when the state had diverted 15 per cent of loan diverted to meet the revenue deficit. Since then, the state government has never diverted from capital receipts account due to improving financial health.
The state had reported a revenue surplus of 1.22 per cent in 2013-14 and 1.09 per cent in 2014-15 (revised estimate) of the GSDP. It is budgeted to be 1.47 per cent in the current financial year. Similarly, fiscal deficit was at 2.94 per cent during the last financial year.
