Gehlot goes all out to woo Rajasthan voters with freebies

CM Ashok Gehlot reaches state parliament to announce budget FY 2023-24

Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot, who also holds the state’s finance portfolio, presented the last Budget of his current tenure in office on February 10, 2023. Calling it a budget of ‘Bachat, Rahat, Badhat’ (Savings, Relief, Growth) ahead of state elections later this year, Gehlot tried to address several pain points of the masses.

He has promised LPG cylinders at Rs 500, 100 units of free electricity per month to domestic consumers against 50 units earlier, free electricity to farmers consuming less than 2,000 units per month, and an inflation relief package of Rs 19,000 crore.

OPS makes a comeback

Gehlot has also announced the return of the old pension scheme. “The benefits of the scheme will be granted to personnel of boards, corporations, academies and universities,” he announced in his speech.

The Old Pension Scheme, which was replaced by the New Pension Scheme, offers a monthly pension to government employees based on their last drawn salary. The NPS was implemented in 2004 by the BJP-led NDA government. Employees did not have to contribute towards pension under OPS.

A highlight of the budget was the fact that no new taxes were announced. The chief minister also promised to widen medical coverage under the Chiranjeevi Health Insurance scheme, increasing the cover to Rs 25 lakh per family per year from Rs 10 lakh earlier.

With the lumpy cattle virus running rampant in the state, the budget has provided economic assistance of Rs 40,000 for the death of each cow in the state.

“Despite the challenges that were witnessed during the Covid pandemic, I feel elated to inform the house that we were able to meet more than 80 percent of our public announcements. We have also completed over 85 percent of the total 2,722 budget announcements made in the past four years,” Gehlot said.

Rising fiscal deficit

However, a comparison of budget documents between FY 2018-19 to FY 2023-24 shows that the fiscal deficit estimates of the state rose from Rs 28,011 crore, which was 2.98 percent of GSDP in 2018-19, to stand at Rs 62,771 crore now, 3.98 percent of GSDP.

Under the FRBM Act, the Centre and states were initially mandated to reduce their fiscal deficit to 3 percent of GDP. However, in early 2009, the FRBM Act's targets were suspended after the global financial crisis and are being re-adjusted in view of the covid pandemic.

It is pertinent to note here that the covid pandemic and the lockdowns that followed forced the economy to shut down, widened the fiscal deficit and forced governments to pour large amounts of money into relief packages.

The fiscal deficit estimate for Rajasthan for FY 2019-20 had risen to Rs 32,678 crore amounting to 3.19 percent of GSDP, which further rose to Rs 47,652 crore in FY 2020-21 or 3.98% of GSDP.

High drama over budget mixup

Meanwhile, the budget announcements sparked high drama as the opposition alleged that CM Gehlot was presenting an old budget. After the proceedings resumed in the Assembly, Gehlot began his presentation by apologising for the mistake. “I feel sorry. What happened was by mistake,” he said.

Former chief minister Vasundhara Raje was among many to hit out at Gehlot over the goof-up. “For 8 minutes, the CM kept reading the old budget. When I was the CM, I used to repeatedly check and read before presenting the budget. You can imagine how safe the state is in the hands of a CM who reads out an old budget,” she said.

PM Narendra Modi raked up the issue during a speech on a visit to Dausa on Sunday. “Anyone can make mistakes but this shows Congress has no vision for the people of the state. The question is not which one (budget) was read, but it (the old budget) was kept inside a box and not implemented.”