Revanth govt puts full stop to borrowings

Hyderabad: The newly-elected Congress-led State Government has dumped the previous BRS government’s economic policy of taking liberal loans. This move, the government said, will save the state from the debt burden that has been inherited by the present government due to mismanagement of state finances during the last ten years.

The government on Saturday announced an end to take off the budget borrowings through Corporations and decided to seek loans within the FRBM limits from the new financial year of 2024-2025.

This was stated by Deputy Chief Minister and State Finance Minister Mallu Bhatti Vikramarka, who presented vote-on-account budget for the new financial year with an total outlay of Rs 2,75,891 crore as against Rs 2.9 lakh crore budget estimation in 2023-2024 financial year.

The outlay, which was less than Rs 15,000 crore in the new financial year, was the result of the government’s decision to put a cap on seeking loans and relieve the state from debt burden.

The official statistics said that the state had an outstanding debt of Rs 72,658 crore in 2014 -15 financial year at the time of the formation of Telangana and it had gone up to Rs 3.52 lakh crore by FY22-23 (RE). As per the budget estimates (BE) in 2024-2025, the debt would touch Rs 3.86 lakh crore by end of current financial year.

The vote-on-account budget report said that the previous government had projected a total amount of Rs 41,000 crore as Grant in aid. But this time it is only Rs 21,000 crore. State finance officials said that the government presented a realistic budget by adopting economic discipline.

“Off-budget debt policy adopted will ruin the state economy and hence the government decided to give up the earlier policy of seeking loans liberally by floating corporations," the officials said.

The budget also indicated that the state economic growth was on a downtrend in the current financial year. The growth rate declined from 14.7 per cent to 11.3 per cent. The economic growth rate in constant prices also declined by 1.0 per cent to Rs 6.5 per cent in the current year from 7.5 per cent in the previous year.

Another worrying factor is the secondary and tertiary sectors of the state economy also showed decline in the growth rate, the budget report said however, the manufacturing sector registered a growth at 5 per cent compared to just 1.3 per cent in the previous year.

Considering all these factors, officials said that the government was not ready to run the government by seeking loans to implement the schemes and other developmental programmes.