THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The very basis of the opposition to the ToR of the 15th Finance Commission is the gargantuan loss of Rs 80,000 crore that all the five south India states put together will supposedly suffer over a period five years. This loss figure but was not arrived at officially by any of the states but has been pulled out of an article by V Bhaskar, which appeared in the March 10 issue of the Economic and Political Weekly. Mr Bhaskar, a former revenue secretary, was a member of the seventh Finance Commission.
This was revealed by finance minister Dr Thomas Isaac himself. “There are various estimates about the losses. But we have mostly used V Bhaskar’s figures that had appeared in the EPW magazine. It is his figure that we have been using for the sake of consistency. In the article he uses 14th FC rewards and the 2011 population growth figures to extrapolate the losses,” Dr Isaac said.
Though Isaac was equally critical of the 14th FC, he conceded that the Commission had transferred more to Kerala. “It happened mainly because forest cover was taken as a major factor while deciding the devolution. After the small northeastern states, we have the largest forest cover, 26 percent. This was a big gain for us,” he said. “Also, the 14th FC for the first time in 30 years conceded that we have revenue deficit, and so they gave us a grant, which during the penultimate fiscal of the UDF tenure was a whopping Rs 4000 crore. If all of this is taken together, we have gained by the 14th FC reward,” he added.
