The State Government will place a single Annual Budget (combined Plan and Non Plan estimates) for the 2017-18 financial year after the Union Budget is presented and passed in the Parliament.
“There will be no Plan and Non Plan heads in the State Budget for the next year. They will be combined. The Budget will be presented taking into considerations of GST and demonetisation impacts and Central allocations. Hence, the Budget will be presented after the Union Budget,” said Finance Minister Pradeep Kumar Amat after chairing a pre-Budget discussion with economists, economic journalists, former Finance Ministers, industrialists and investors, RBI and Nabard representatives at the Secretariat here on Tuesday.
Amat tot stated that the Government would emphasise on increasing revenue collection from different sources.
Former Finance Minister Prafulla Ghadei opined, “The size of the Budget depends on the size of revenue. People’s expectations are that the State Government will place a big size budget. But, the status of revenue collection till November indicates that the collection from both own tax and nontax in comparison to last year’s position has slumped,” he said.
However, he said the State Government should this time bring forth a big size Budget of about Rs over Rs 1 lakh crore.”
Economic journalist Dilip Satapathy said, “Non-tax revenue in the first eight months has gone down to -.91%. The main reason is that the mining revenue, i.e. two-third of non-tax revenue, that used to be in the State’s coffers has substantially slumped down. Since no growth is being marked in both the non-tax and own-tax revenues, the big challenge before the State Government now is how to meet the escalating expenditures.”
He said many have suggested to the Government to collect profession taxes from professionals like doctors, lawyers and Chartered Accountants to increase revenue collection.