KCR comes down heavily on Budget; terms it 'great fraud'

Hyderabad: Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao said the budget proposals presented by Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman was disappointing and would adversely affect the development of the progress of Telangana State.

The Chief Minister who reviewed the impact of the budget proposals for about four hours with officials said the Centre had shown discrimination against Telangana by imposing severe cuts on funds to be released to the State.

"It was atrocious that the Centre had reduced the ratio of the State in the Central taxes. There is a danger of having fund crunch for several welfare and development programmes and schemes due to the heavy cuts in the Central funds," he said.

The Chief Minister said due to the reduction in State share from Central taxes, Telangana was deprived of Rs 3,731 crore tax revenue out of the Rs 19,718 crore.

In the 2020-21 Budget proposals, on the funds to be allocated to Telangana, there will be two types loss to the State. The Centre had accepted the proposals given by the 15th Finance Commission reducing the State's share of funds from 42 per cent to 41 per cent, he added.

The second one is, in the past, Telangana was given 2.437 per cent of share and this Financial Year it was reduced to 2.133 per cent. With this, there will be direct decrease of Rs 2,381 crore funds from the Centre to the State.

Reducing such a whopping sum of funds to the State is nothing but an out and out discrimination. This will have an adverse impact on Telangana development plans, the Chief Minister pointed out.

Chandrashekar Rao said it was a sheer incompetence of the Centre to decrease the ratio of the State in Central funds given to the States. "There is a need to collect taxes in 2019-20 and release the share of funds to the States.

On every occasion, the funds are paid to the States according to the proposals declared in the Budget. There were occasions when there was a variation of one or half percent.

But reducing funds to the tune of a whopping 18.9 per cent in 2019-20 clearly demonstrated the Centre's faulty fiscal management. This had adversely impacted the Telangana State severely," he said.

"The Centre is committing a great fraud and cheating on the GST front. In the GST Act brought in 2017, it was clearly stated that for the State, which registered less than 14 per cent of growth rate, deficit caused by the GST would be compensated for five years.

As per this, the Centre owes a compensation of Rs 1,137 crore to the State. The Centre has not given any clarity on these compensation funds," he said.