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Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah will present the state budget on Friday, the first since Congress came to power in the state after the May 10 elections.
The second budget for fiscal year 2023-24, while announcing the actual appropriation required to meet the five pre-ballot guarantees of Congress, is also expected to focus on increasing the revenue generation needed to fund big-ticket advertising.
This will be Siddaramaiah’s seventh budget as CEO, having submitted six of them during his tenure from 2013 to 2018. The budget will also be the fourteenth budget Siddaramaiah has attended.
The Cabinet had attracted some scorn from bureaucratic circles when it was announced that the size of the budget was Rs 3.35 crore, which they claimed was against the established tradition of keeping the size of the budget secret. In February this year, former Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai announced a budget of Rs 3.09 lakh crores.
According to the sources, the budget – unlike the allocations for various sectors in the last five budgets – will have allocations at the departmental level. During the Covid years, the government started to practice sectoral allocations. Additional borrowing is also expected to finance the guarantees. However, the government was hopeful that the guarantee schemes would help raise additional revenue in the coming months.
There is also speculation that the government could scrap some old schemes to reduce the burden on the treasury. The guarantee schemes, according to Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, will cost Rs 60,000 crore annually. However, official sources say the actual allocation could be about 10-15 percent lower.
Eyes will also be on the budget in regards to the Bengaluru allocations as the transformation of Bengaluru as a global hub was among the promises made in the statement. It also remains to be seen whether the Congress government will allocate funds for the proposed tunnel road project in Bengaluru to ease traffic.
Provisions for schemes such as the Mekedatu Project and the Mahadayi Project will also be under the scanner.
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