AP people feel hoodwinked again

For many, the budget, crammed with jugglery of figures and the jargons beyond comprehension, is somewhat a hard nut to crack. Therefore, the exercise remains an exclusive domain of a few elites for consumption of TV debates and expert columns in the print media.

But this time around when Union Minister Arun Jaitley presented the Budget for 2017-18 in Parliament on February 1, people from across the spectrum, right from the political class and the academia to the man on the street, eagerly looked up to him for some balm to help the truncated AP nurse its bruises.

In fact, the aborted protest by a group of Facebook generation on the RK Beach, kicking up a noisy debate on the fate of the Special Category Status (SCS), has served as a backgrounder for Jaitley’s feat in terms of a budget with AP relevance.

The whole polity in the state was polarised, supporting and attacking the NDA government on the SCS. Does SCS give any relevance to the talk of the Budget? “Yes,” emphatically said the young protesters, linking the SCS with a slew of incentives on offer for investors to spur industrial growth. The industrial growth is viewed as a palliative to the rising unemployment involving mainly young engineering graduates.

Under siege from all directions, Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu, as a face-saving measure, exhorted his party MPs before the commencement of the Parliamentary session to turn heat on the NDA government for a legal status for the special package extended to the state as a substitute to the SCS.

As the budget unfolded with highlights scrolling on the TVs and the social media platforms, people in the state felt taken for a ride afresh as they were subjected to at the time of the state bifurcation and were thoroughly disheartened.

Unmindful of Andhra people’s expectations and sentiments, the Jaitley’s budget remained mum on not only the SCS, but also on the legal sanctity for the package.

Same is the case with the Centre’s promise for pumping of resources to fill the revenue deficit caused by skewed distribution of resources during the state division.

It was concluded that the successor state was left with a revenue deficit of Rs 16,000cr at the time of the division and the AP State Reorganisation Act, 2014, promised to ensure resource filling during the fiscal year itself.

But the assistance the state has received in different spells failed to cross Rs 4,000cr even as the AP government stated that its revenue is expected to shoot up to Rs 24,000 crore in the upcoming financial year.

Jaitley seemed to have had nothing to offer in his current budget for the seven backward districts under the special package for development of backward regions.

The Centre is in a bind over allocating Rs 200 crore per year for each backward district under the Reorganisation Act. It allocated Rs 350 crore in 2016-17 financial year only for all the seven backward districts in Uttarandhra and Rayalaseema regions together at the rate of Rs 50 crore for each district.

To quote K S Chalam, former Vice-Chancellor of Dravidian University at Kuppam and a native of Uttarandhra region, even paltry funds released under the head remained unspent without addressing the basic needs of the backward districts.

Barring the tax sops for the farmers in the Amaravati region, the budget failed to make any provision for capital funding, forcing the Naidu government to knock on every door for borrowings.

Jaitley also failed to provide any silver lining for the proposal to create a railway zone in Visakhapatnam, one of the bifurcation-related promises, to become a reality.

In what could be viewed as a flickering hope for the pending Polavaram project, the Union Budget seeks to hike the funding from Rs 20,000 crore for the Nabard (National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development) through which the Centre made a financial arrangement of Rs 18,000cr for completing the project.

AP government media advisor Parakala Prabhakar, however, maintained that the measures out to be initiated by the Centre for the state like the legal sanctity for the package and the railway zone do not have to be necessarily mentioned in the Union Budget.