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Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Haste Makes Waste

Editorial:-
One often hears people with bills stuck with government departments complain of how they are routinely turned away with excuses of the department not having enough funds. There was a time when an accounts section in a government department had put up a notice on its door announcing that it did not have funds and that people should not bother them unnecessarily. More recently, the regularized MR and Workcharged employees who have not received their salaries since April are also probably being given the run around with the excuse that the required funds have not been released. Most times, people accept these excuses as being truthful, believing that the concerned personnel in the government know their job and that the government was genuinely cash-strapped. But that is almost never the case as reports of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India on the State’s finances have routinely pointed out. More often than not, the government ends up not spending up to a quarter of the funds at its disposal on any given financial year. For instance, against the total provision of Rs. 5,359 crore for 2012-13, only an expenditure of Rs. 3,934.05 crore was incurred. An inexcusable 26.60 per cent of the provisions, totaling a staggering Rs. 1,425.49 crore, was left unspent.
Now, if this ‘saving’, and this cannot really be called a saving, was a result of austerity measures and judicious book-keeping, one would be all praises for the army of accountants in government departments. But that was not the case; the ‘savings’ resulted from incompetence. Few examples illustrate this slipshod financial planning better than the habitual rush of expenditure in the last quarter of the financial year, with a bulk of this coming in the closing month, March. When it comes to the budget and the segregation of demands for grants, the government breaks it up into 46 departments. As per the CAG Report, 22 of these departments showed an injudicious ‘rush of expenditure’ between Jan to March 2013 in the financial year 2012-13. This expenditure was under 33 heads and the record reflects on those rushed [it should really be called delayed] expenditure which were in excess of 50% of the provision, i.e. instances when the department spent 50% of its budget [under a particular head] in the last three months of the year. Some of the standouts in this list are Land Revenue Department which did not spend anything on water supply and sanitation for 9 months and then spent the entire budgetary provision between Jan to March, with 62% of it in March 2013 alone. Expenditure on ‘public works’ by the same department for the said financial year was paid out entirely in March 2013. HRDD spent 67% of its “capital outlay for education, sports, arts and culture” in the last quarter. It goes without saying that the last minute rush, the diligence of the accounts departments to spend it all, does not offer enough time to really ‘spend it all’ due to which up to 27% of the budgetary provision remained unspent in 2012-13. It would have been less worrying if this was just saving, but it is more than that, it is unplanned finances resulting in compromised projects and schemes. Surely, if 27% of the provisions remain unspent and between 17 to 40% of the budget spent in the last quarter, everything for which the funds were earmarked in the budget projections gets compromised. Clearly, budgetary control should be strengthened and a good place to begin would be to have a “Budget Manual” which enumerates detailed procedures for better financial management.

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