Coal news and updates

Jharkhand budget counts on coal auction revenues

The enthusiasm of Chief Minister Raghubar Das in presenting Jharkhand’s first budget under a government formed by a party that now enjoys simple majority was palpable on Tuesday: its ambitiousness were on levels the state has not seen before.

Promising a lot and rarely explaining how his government intends to get there, Das, who also handles the Finance portfolio, gave a glimpse into his thought-process when he announced a Monorail feasibility study for Ranchi, a poorly-planned city found wanting in some of the most rudimentary of civic amenities.

The indications are that Das, an admirer of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, intends his government’s policies to dovetail with the Union Government’s: Jharkhand’s budget counts heavily on the revenues generated from the ongoing coal auction, for example. Though the CM repeatedly talked about the coal windfall, he never mentioned the staggered, and even unpredictable, nature of payments.
“There are no new taxes proposed, so revenues from the coal auction and Finance Commission will probably help explain how the state’s own taxes went from Rs. 9379 crore collected in 2013-’14 to a projected Rs. 14,700 in 2015-’16 and non-taxes from Rs. 3,752 crores to Rs. 6,304 crores during the same period,” said Ramesh Sharan, head of the department of Economics at Ranchi University. He pointed out that the budget announces no new taxes.

There was controversy to boot: major Hindi dailies in the state reported on the size and nature of the budget, a supposedly confidential document, on Tuesday morning. Pradeep Yadav, legislative party leader of the JVM-P, raised the fact on the floor of the House as soon as the session began; CM Das said that he would conduct an internal inquiry into the leak. One of the dailies even had a chart detailing allocations to various departments, it said the total plan expenditure would come to Rs. 32,251.845 crores; Das’s budget plans to spend Rs. 32,136.84 crores. The state managed to spend less than half of the last budget’s planned expenditure of Rs. 26,754.97 crores.

In all, the government plans to spend Rs. 55,492.95 crores. When pointed out that his government may not have allocated enough money for some of his most ambitious projects, CM Das said in a post-budget press conference that there would be no shortage of money: “We can always go the PPP route or introduce supplementary budgets.” In fact, one such supplementary budget, for Rs. 1,778.22 crores, was passed only on the eve of the annual budget.

The government plans to construct a new capital, within which will have new Secretariat and High Court buildings. It plans three new medical colleges at Hazaribagh, Palamu and Dumka. Das announced the construction of a Knowledge City at Khunti, a Sports University and a Cancer hospital and “Medico City” each within Ranchi district.

Das said that his government would hire one lakh employees over

the next fiscal. This includes 10,000 police constables. To help administer the state, the governments will form a Development Council and also district-level Adivasi Development Councils. The government has promised the construction of an Investigation School for the police and the formation of an Anti-Terrorism Squad. It will raise two battalions in Dumka and Palamu comprising those of the Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups.

Das said his government would distribute free tabs to the 10,500 eighth standard students in the various Kasturba Vidyalayas in the state. The government also plans to distribute solar-powered study lamps to students.


source: http://indianexpress.com