TS Govt drops plan for a separate Agriculture budget

Hyderabad : The Telangana Government has decided not to introduce a separate budget for Agriculture for the financial year 2018-19 as announced earlier.

The reason for this is absence of a provision for a separate department wise budget in the Constitution. The guidelines and Legislative procedures will also not permit a separate budget for any department. Chief Minister K. Chandrashekhar Rao has reviewed issues pertaining to introduction of the State Budget and of having a separate budget for agriculture for the financial year 2018-19. Ministers T Harish Rao, P Srinivas Reddy, Etela Rajender, Mahender Reddy, Tummala Nageswara Rao, Chief Whips in Assembly and Council Koppula Eswar, P Sudhakar Reddy, Government’s Chief Advisor Rajiv Sharma, Economic Advisor GR Reddy, Principal Secretaries S Narsing Rao, Ramakrishna Rao, Parthasarathy, Agriculture Commissioner Jagan Mohan, Horticulture Commissioner Venkatram Reddy, Legislative Assembly Secretary Narasimha Charyulu and others participated.

The Chief Minister said that the state government has been giving top priority to agriculture from the beginning and sufficient funds are going to be allocated in this Budget to take up more programmes and schemes for farmers in this Budget. The state government earlier has decided to introduce a separate Budget for agriculture as it was giving more importance to the sector.

A discussion took place on the feasibility of such a proposal in the meeting. The officials informed that the entire State Budget should be one and only one and the Constitution guidelines will not allow to have separate budgets for the departments. Under Rule 150 of the Legislative guidelines, receipts and expenditure are only treated as Budget. Other plans, programmes and schemes would come under the Bills and as such they cannot be treated as separate Budget, the officials explained. They have also recalled how under the united AP, once the efforts to introduce a separate Budget for agriculture turned controversial and how it was withdrawn.

KCR also reminded that at the Centre too, the Railway Budget which was earlier a separate one is now introduced along with the Annual Budget. With this, the CM announced the withdrawal of proposal to introduce a separate Agriculture Budget for the financial year 2018-19 for agriculture. He said in the Budget itself it would be explained about the priority given to the agriculture, allocation of funds, programmes and schemes.