The Parliament on Tuesday approved additional spending of Rs 58,378 crore for the current fiscal year, allocating a major portion of the funds to MGNREGA and fertiliser subsidies. This will mean that the gross additional spending will cross Rs 1.29 lakh crore, out of which Rs 70,968 crore would be matched by savings and receipts.
The Rajya Sabha returned the two appropriation bills to Lok Sabha post a discussion during the day. The majority of the members involved in the discussion belonged to the Treasury benches after many Opposition members were suspended from the House, reported PTI. Members of the Opposition who were present during the day didn’t partake in the discussion.
Notably, last week the Lok Sabha passed the supplementary demands for grants following a short discussion. Replying to the discussion on the same in Rajya Sabha, the Minister of State for Finance, Pankaj Chaudhary, stressed the major aspects of the first batch of demands for grants. According to these demands, the government’s net additional spending would touch Rs 58,378.21 crore in the current fiscal year (April 2023 to March 2024).
The extra expenditure includes Rs 13,351 crore for fertiliser subsidies and nearly Rs 7,000 crore towards expenses made by the Department of Food and Public Distribution. An extra outflow of Rs 9,200 crore is directed towards spending by the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, and Rs 14,524 crore by the Ministry of Rural Development towards MGNREGA, included in the supplementary demands.
The overall supplementary demand for spending by the Ministry of External Affairs is Rs 20,000 crore, which would be adjusted against reducing expenditure by more than Rs 9,000 crore. For the entire 2023-24 financial year, the government has decided the fiscal deficit to be Rs 17.86 lakh crore, or 5.9 per cent of the GDP. Notably, the fiscal deficit during the April to October period in the current fiscal stood at 45.6 per cent of the whole year’s Budget Estimate of the previous financial year.
