HYDERABAD: Telangana’s financial condition would have been much better, had the Centre not put spokes in the form of restrictions on loans, cut in funds and grants, reduction in tax devolution etc, felt the Cabinet meeting chaired by Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao at Pragathi Bhavan on Thursday.
A press release issued by the Chief Minister’s Office (CMO) said the finance department officials explained to the Cabinet that the state had received just Rs 47,312 crore funds under CSS (centrally-sponsored schemes) in the last eight years.
In the last financial year, the state government’s total expenditure was Rs 1.84 lakh crore. Out of which only Rs 5,200 crore had been received under CSS schemes amounting to a meagre 3 per cent of total expenditure.
Officials informed the Cabinet that the state registered 15.3 per cent growth rate in the state’s revenue in this financial year. The Chief Minister said it was noteworthy that the state registered growth despite the funds due to the state under CSS and various schemes from the Centre registered negative growth of -12.9 per cent.
Delay in the release of central funds to the states was taking place due to the introduction of the System of National Accounts (SNA). Not only this, the FRMB limits were not being finalised in time and also enforcing cuts in the limits, the meeting felt. The state revenues would have increased further and registered a growth rate of 22 per cent if there were no cuts in the FRMB limits.
Telangana state contributed 5 per cent of the country’s income although the state’s population is only 2.5 per cent in the total country’s population. Officials informed the Cabinet that Telangana stood number one in the country with 11.5 per cent growth in state tax revenue.
Official sources said since the Centre was creating financial hurdles, the Cabinet directed officials to explore all the options to raise revenues on their own to ensure that the welfare schemes and development programmes were not hit due to fund crunch. The Cabinet asked officials to improve tax collections by plugging leakages, identify government land parcels in all the districts which could be put up for auction, encourage land pooling by urban local bodies to develop layouts and auction them etc, it is learnt.
IT special secretary Jayesh Ranjan told the Cabinet that 1.55 lakh new jobs were created last year and Telangana was number one in job creation in the country. IT officials explained that Bengaluru which was number one in IT created 1.48 lakh jobs and Hyderabad generated more jobs.
Officials informed the Cabinet that the development in the IT sector had been made possible with the special policies, incentives, investor friendly policies, infrastructure creation, maintenance of law and order, uninterrupted quality power supply and availability of human resources which had been implemented by the state government in the IT sector.
On this occasion, the Chief Minister expressed his happiness on the fast pace development of the IT sector of the state. The Chief Minister praised IT minister KT Rama Rao, IT secretary Jayesh Ranjan and other officials.
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