New Delhi: The finance ministry said on Friday that it will stick to its fiscal consolidation roadmap without compromising on development spending and expenditure budgeted for the current fiscal. “The government is committed to promoting and strengthening inclusive and sustainable development by ensuring pro-per and effective utilisation of funds provided in the annual budget without compromising fiscal consolidation,” said the finance ministry. It said that as a result of sound prudent policies formulated during 2015-16, the fiscal deficit at the end of November 2015 is Rs 4.83 lakh crores or 87 per cent of the budget estimate for this fiscal. The fiscal de-ficit, that is the gap between expenditure and revenue, for the entire current fiscal year has been pegged at Rs 5.55 lakh crore (3.9 per cent of GDP).
“The present fiscal situation is an improvement over the previous year when the fiscal deficit was then 98.9 per cent of budget estimates 2014-15. In absolute terms, there is a decrease of Rs 41, 611 crore over the November 2014 figure,” said the ministry. It said that similarly, the effective revenue deficit (revenue deficit net of grants for creation of capital assets) which was Rs 2,64,404 crores in November 2015 has shown a significant decrease of 20 per cent ('65,087 crores) over November 2014.
“As regards expenditure, against the budget estimates of Rs 1,35,257 crores for plan expenditure for creation of capital assets, the government has already incurred Rs 97,788 crores (72 per cent of budget estimate) as compared to Rs 62,146 crores (51 per cent of BE) in the corresponding period of last year,” it said. The total expenditure also increased from 60 per cent of BE in November, 2014 to 64 per cent in November, 2015.
