With the increase in the size of the budget in every financial year in the state, the size of the budget is increasing, but the capacity of the departments to spend the budget is not increasing. There is a huge difference of about Rs 15 thousand to Rs 20 thousand crore between the fixed budget size and the budget amount to be spent. The government faces the challenge of balancing budget size and expenditure. For the new financial year 2024-25, the state government has kept the budget size at Rs 89230.07 crore. The total budget provision in the financial year 2023-24 was Rs 77407.08 crore. Supplementary budget is not included in this. The size of the new budget is approximately Rs 11823 crore i.e. 15.27 percent more than the previous one. The state government is increasing the budget every year, but has not been able to improve the functioning of the departments regarding its utilization. The situation is that the progress of budget expenditure remains very slow in the first quarter of the financial year.
Not only this, the pace of budget approval is also not achieving the expected pace. As a result, a large part of the budget is likely to be spent in March, the last month of the financial year itself. It is a different matter that even after this, neither a huge amount of money is being sanctioned nor the departments are getting success in spending 100% of the sanctioned amount. The matter of relief in this matter is that there has been considerable progress in the expenditure of capital item budget in the current financial year. Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami has also had to participate in this campaign of monitoring the departments. The situation is almost the same regarding the expenditure of budget funds of centrally funded schemes and externally aided schemes.
