Finance Minister Etela Rajender will present the first-ever budget of Telangana State in the Assembly at its session that begins on November 5 at 11 am. Deputy Chief Minister Dr T Rajaiah will present the same in the Legislative Council at the same time.
Talking to the media here on Tuesday, Harish Rao said the first budget of Rs 1 lakh crore would be presented in both the Houses. Fortunately, the Telangana government will present a budget of around Rs 1lakh crore in the Assembly wherein the previous Congress government denied to allocate even a single rupee for Telangana region. The Finance Minister will present the budget in the Assembly followed by a Cabinet approval, he said.
Earlier, it was said, the budget could be around Rs 85,000 crore to Rs 90,000 crore. If this is the case, non-plan budget, as usual, will be high at Rs 65,000 crore and the planned budget allocation will be just Rs 35,000 crore (or it could be Rs 70,000 crore and Rs 30,000 crore).
These two allocations are similar to that of previous ones which also used to have bigger disparity. Actually the governments used to follow the previous custom to allocate funds to these two heads with a slight difference of Rs 20,000 cr to Rs 35,000 cr. This was the case during previous budgets of YSR regime and Roshaiah regime. However during Kiran Kumar Reddy’s regime this difference rose to about Rs 40,000 cr between the two heads when the total budget was put at around Rs 1 lakh cr. Now keeping the priorities and promises made in view the TRS Government is planning to come up with a budget of about Rs 1 lakh cr.
The TRS is learnt to have preferred to allocate adequate funds to its major projects like Telangana Water Grid, Lakes restoration, Power Projects, irrigation, farmers, Harithaharam, pensions, Shadi Mubarak and other welfare schemes it is learnt. Welfare schemes used to get more allocations than that of development programs in the budget of any government.(NSS)