Assam’s 2023-24 budget ‘unrealistic, overestimated’, says CAG; questions excessive supplementary grants
GUWAHATI: The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) has termed the Assam government budgetary assumptions for 2023-24 “unrealistic and overestimated,” pointing out that in several cases supplementary grants were approved where expenditure of the original allotted funds was not even done.
It also highlighted non-submission of Utilisation Certificates (UCs) and annual accounts of several autonomous councils and other bodies.overestimated” during the fiscal year, as it incurred an expenditure of Rs 1,39,449.66 crore against grants and appropriations of Rs 1,69,966.13 crore, resulting in overall savings of Rs 30,516.47 crore.
These savings stood at 17.95 per cent of total grants and appropriations made for the year.
The report said that “the savings were notional, as the funds were not actually available for expenditure”, since the actual receipts were Rs 1,38,830.79 crore against the estimated Rs 1,65,215.70 crore.
The CAG report on state finances for 2023-24, laid in the Assembly on Saturday, said the budgetary assumptions of the state government “continued to be unrealistic In its recommendations, the CAG said the state government “may formulate a realistic budget based on reliable assumptions of likely resource mobilisation, the assessed needs of the departments and their capacity to utilise the allocated resources so as to avoid inflated budgeting without corresponding to the available resources”.
It also said that the Finance department “may review the departments having persistent savings for realistic budget allocation and monitoring of expenditure”.
The report further pointed out that supplementary grants of a total of Rs 30,210.86 crore were approved by the legislature for 2023-24, whereas audit analysis of utilisation of these grants showed that only 74.19 per cent of it was required.
“Seeking supplementary grants without a requirement is indicative of poor budgetary management by the state government. Further, it is also clear that there is an absence of allocative efficiency and utilisation efficiency by departments, which led to excess expenditure in some grants and savings in others”, it noted.
The CAG report further said that 6,335 UCs aggregating to Rs 18,669.55 crore during the period 2005-06 to 2022-23 have not been submitted.