<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
State chief minister Neiphiu Rio on Monday told newsmen Rs 0.24 crore was collected from COVID-19 cess in April and Rs 3.36 crore in May, while the total collection in 2020-21 was estimated at Rs 37.25 crore. “The collections so far are a fraction of what we have already spent without budgetary support,” he added. <\/p>\n
He said his government took a considered decision to levy COVID-19 cess following a preliminary assessment of the levels of expenditure that would have to be incurred to fight the pandemic, especially considering the need to build health infrastructure and for procurement of machinery and equipments, including protective items and medicines. He mentioned that the coming months would continue to see significant expenditure in transportation of returnees, food, purchase of medicines and equipments, completion of BSL labs and purchase of equipments and consumables for the labs and investments that would be required in the district hospitals to facilitate them in dealing with increasing number of COVID-19 positive cases.<\/p>\n
There were also other frontline agencies like the administration, police, fire services, etc, that were incurring heavy expenses in their daily activities connected to the pandemic, he added.<\/p>\n
Although the amounts being collected from COVID-19 cess were nominal, he explained that due to the extraordinary circumstances, measures to tap all possible resources had to be initiated to ensure that the State did not face financial collapse.<\/p>\n
He said the government had decided to name it COVID-19 cess to ensure that amounts collected were used entirely for the purpose of fighting the pandemic by making it more visible and traceable.<\/p>\n
Rio further informed that the State government had provided an assistance of Rs 2,000 each (direct transfer to bank accounts) to 19,046 construction workers through the labour department from the cess fund to protect them from the impact of economic disruption due to the lockdown, which cost the state exchequer Rs 3.80 crore.<\/p>\n
Rs.3.6 cr collected from COVID-19 Cess on fuel<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[679],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-214466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-nagaland-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214466","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=214466"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214466\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=214466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=214466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=214466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}