Goal and priorities of state budget

The Vote on Account for first six months of the 2021-22 financial year presented by the Assam government in the State Assembly reveals that despite significant improvement over earlier years, 32 per cent of the budgetary outlays for 2019-20 remained unspent. More attention to improving the capacity of various government departments to spend the allocated fund will ensure timely utilization of enhanced budgetary allocations. Increase in capital expenditure from Rs. 6,001 crore in 2016-17 to Rs.13,501 crore in 2019-20 is significant as it helped the state create more asset and value. Statistical data on budgetary allocations and spending give the actual picture of progress of a state in various sectors when comparisons are made with development indicators of other states apart from the state's own in earlier years. In the health sector, setting up 1,000 Intensive Care Unit beds and 4,500 regular hospital beds, and a provision of 1,408 ventilators and 4,541 oxygen cylinders to fight the COVID-19 pandemic helped the state achieve high recovery rate and maintaining one of the lowest mortality rates. The state still has a huge gap in availability of hospital beds as is evident from the Reserve Bank of India report titled "State Finances: A Study of Budgets of 2020-21". The report states that Karnataka, Kerala, and Telangana have the highest estimated number of beds per 10,000 population while Bihar, Odisha, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Assam, and Madhya Pradesh have the lowest number of beds. The Vote on Account presented by Finance, Health and Education Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma lists allocations made and spent under a host of welfare schemes and programmes targeting to benefit different sections of beneficiaries- farmers, women, students, tea garden workers. He mentions that money has started flowing into the bank accounts of the 17,25, 590 beneficiaries of the Orunodoi scheme of providing monthly cash assistance of Rs 830. The State government's announcement that it proposes to increase the monthly pay out to Rs 3000 without any indication of budgetary allocation appears to a pre-election announcement sop for the targeted beneficiaries. Economists have cautioned that increasing the amount of such monthly pay out or any universal basic income plan with budgetary support will run the risk of withdrawal of a huge workforce in the state's informal and contractual sectors in which they are earning less than Rs 3000. Increasing the amount as proposed by the State government will be possible only when minimum assured monthly wages for these contractual workers like mid-day meal cook, Accredited Social Health Activists, Anganwadi workers are proportionately increased. Withdrawal of these workers due to low wages against monthly pay out under Orunodoi scheme will jeopardise the implementation of the flagship programmes in Health, Education, Social Welfare department. Most of the workers belong to farm families and it is the distress in the farm sector which has compelled them to work for low monthly wages of around Rs 1200-1500. The cash assistance of Rs 8000 over the past three years to the tea garden workers under the Chah Bagichar Dhan Purasakar Mela scheme have provided financial relief to over seven lakh garden workers. However, the amount is too little to offset the requirement of garden workers for higher daily wages to make their both ends meet. The Economic Survey 2021 reveals that access of rural households to housing, water, sanitation, electricity, and clean cooking fuel in Assam has not improved much from the 2012 level which raises question over effectiveness of budgetary allocations of providing cash assistance for different target groups in improving the state's indices of bare necessities. Assam ranks 23rd in NITI Aayog's ranking for 28 states based on their overall performances towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and budgetary allocations and utilization are critical to improve the ranking. Under the Redesigned Swami Vivekananda Youth Empowerment Yojana the 1,42,790 beneficiaries have received the first tranche of Rs. 30,000 totalling to an amount of Rs. 433.36 crore which is encouraging for the youths of the state. Constant evaluation and monitoring of the utilization of the amount released to various self-help groups will be crucial in achieving the objective of the grooming them as entrepreneurs. Success of entrepreneurship promoted by the scheme has the potential to generate huge employment in the state when number of educated unemployed is rising alarmingly. The Vote on Account does not reflect a focused attention to the state's agriculture sector, more particularly in respect of ensuring a remunerative price of farm produce without which distress in the sector will continue to push rural youth from farm families to migrate out of their villages into urban areas in search of livelihood. Prioritizing allocations supporting the agriculture sector and for creating the value chain along with the social sector development in key sectors like health, education will yield better results than one-time cash assistances to different beneficiary groups.