<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Nagaland is projected to record its highest deficit at Rs.2,358.81 crore for the current financial year 2020-21. Deficits are not necessarily bad if capital investments bring in revenues. However, Nagaland like most states in the north east, has very little prospect of increasing revenues except for the annual revenue receipts. What is worse is that the 15th Finance Commission in its report – ‘Finance Commission in COVID times’ (Vol IV)- mentioned that Nagaland also had the second highest debt in the country. Though Nagaland’s Debt\/GSDP had reduced from 55.5% in 2011–12 to 42.7 in 2018–19, The 15th FC said that it was still much higher than the National Health Education Standards (NEHS) average of 29.61%. The Commission also noted that Nagaland need to take measures to reduce burden of committed expenditure to free up resources for development expenditure. The 15th FC also pointed out that debt should be consolidated in line with the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act (FRBM Act), 2003, to reduce fiscal deficit and the recommendations of FC-XV. Further, the Commission also noted that the State needed to restructure and rationalise its expenditure priorities. The committed expenditure (including GIA Salary) of Nagaland was 67.3% of its total revenue receipts in 2018–19 when all other states averaged 50.6%. As per the Ranking in NITI Aayog’s Sustainable Development Goals Index (2019), Nagaland was placed 19th out of 29 States. The 15th FC had also observed that the CD ratio was very high, meaning the banks are not lending enough. The reasons for this has to be addressed and the state government has to ensure that necessary conditions, facilities and infrastructure have to be put in place. In their last visit to the state, the 15th FC members also expressed the need for the state Government to explore more avenues to generate resources to fund its developmental activities. It was also made clear that there was also need for rationalisation of employees so as to bring down revenue expenditure and increase developmental expenditure. The consequences of poor infrastructure undercuts the potential for growth and that adversely affects job creation. Without growth, unemployment continues to grow while the government has been left as the only agency to provide employment. According to the latest figure, there are 1,40,000 government employees under the government’s roll which is a little over 7.1 % of the state’s 19,80,602 population. As per the definition of the 13th Finance Commission and based on its well defined parameters, the state has an excess of over 70,000 government employees. Such a huge number of unproductive force is eating up 67.3% of the budget. So much money is being spent on salaries and upkeep of the government each year while much needed resources have to be borrowed from the market. An unwieldy government that is heavily laden with excess employees will have to contend with managing itself rather than that of the people. However, the budget deficits, repayment and interests on loans also add more burdens in the pursuit of all round growth. The state government has to seriously consider oil and gas explorations in order to tide over its perennial deficit problems so as to spur growth. However, unless there is fiscal responsibility and accountability, no amount of money will make things work. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Unchecked spending<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[685],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-209437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209437"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209437\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}