Having proudly pushed up Bihar’s annual plan expenditure size to `27,365 crore for the current financial year, the Nitish Kumar-led government has been found lagging in spending the money and has faced bitter criticism from the Opposition parties for alleged financial mismanagement and “arch loot”.
The JD(U)-BJP coalition government, which boasts of bringing about an average 10 per cent state GDP growth since it came to power in November 2005, has managed to spend less than 40 per cent of the plan size, according to figures shown by the main Opposition party RJD. The government had first secured a plan size of `24,000 crore for 2011-12 and then raised it to `27,365 crore through two supplementary appropriation bills.
The government’s record of actual utilisation of the funds has taken much of the air out of its repeatedly flamboyant mention about how it had and successively increased Bihar’s annual plan size from the previous RJD regime’s less than `2,000 crore to `4,500 crore in the first year it won power.
Senior RJD leader Abdul Bari Siddiqui, leader of the Opposition in the Assembly, said the government had spent only `6,970 crore till September 2011. He accused the government of engaging in “rampant fabrication of figures” and planning to commit a “March loot of the public money”.
Citing comparative figures of expenditures between September and November 2011, Siddiqui said: “While the transport department had spent zero per cent till September, its figures in November said it had spent 63 per cent of the funds. While the building department had spent just four per cent till September, the figure went up to 33 percent in November. The health department had spent only 10.80 per cent till September, but said its expenditures were 32.35 per cent by November.”
But deputy CM Sushil Kumar Modi, who holds the finance portfolio, disagreed and said: “The delay was because of obvious difficulties between July and October. Work gathers speed in November.”
We will achieve the targets well in March.”