Farmers Movement Archive

Centre arm-twisting Punjab over farmers’ protest: Manpreet Singh Badal

CHANDIGARH: Blaming the Centre for not releasing Punjab’s rural development fund (RDF) and pending share of GST, Punjab finance minister Manpreet Singh Badal termed it as an ‘arm-twisting’ tactic in wake of the ongoing farmers’ protest against farm laws. He also claimed that while Covid pandemic pushed the global economy into recession, Punjab has not availed the overdraft facility in the current financial year. “Holding back the RDF is an arm-twisting tactic. They (BJP at the Centre) are annoyed with us over the fact that Punjab farmers are agitating and that we are not controlling it. The pending GST is Rs 8,500 crore. The Centre has raised the borrowing limit from 3 % to 5 % but Punjab will not go beyond 3% at least this year,” he said. “Their promise on the MSP does not ring true because of the way they defaulted on the GST compensation issue, which was a constitutional obligation,” said Manpreet. Punjab deprived of RDF, food park for UAEGiving a last year’s wrap up, Manpreet rued that where the Centre had deprived Punjab of RDF, it did not choose the state for setting up of one of the three food parks for the UAE. “It would have been a big investment and UAE was keen on coming to Punjab. We had even sent a proposal. No prize for guessing that one of the park projects went to Gujarat,” he said. “The Centre’s attitude towards Punjab is unfair. They held back Rs 1,200 crore RDF. I met with the Union minister also and the move smacked of politics,” he added. On the delay in GST compensation, he said, “There is huge pendency of GST by the Centre. The Centre now says we cannot compensate fully due to Covid. They want us to borrow the interest while the Centre will give the original of the total loss due to the pandemic. With a population of around 3 crore, there is a per head debt of a bit less than Rs 1 lakh. But we don’t intend to borrow this year,” he added. Punjab was the last state to agree to the Centre’s options on GST compensation, he said. No data of pensioners, properties“You will be surprised to know that Punjab had no electronic database of pensioners in the state. There were also complaints of harassment and corruption. But now after the data is ready, the pensioners can track the status of their pension on their phones,” said Manpreet. Soon Punjab will be ready with a new database that will keep a track of all properties and buildings of the Punjab government in the state. “We did not know how many properties we had in Mohali or how many offices we had in a district. Even for revenue earning departments like GST, a software is being provided to track the amount of collections made by the,” he said. “After the vehicle management system was brought in, there was a dip of 16% in fuel consumption despite the hike in prices. This also helped in checking irregularities. Now, the Punjab government is also keeping a track of direct beneficiaries of the various centrally-sponsored schemes digitally. “These funds go to the accounts of the beneficiaries and are not transferred to any of the state departments,” he said. Salaries delayed for complianceManpreet added, “You read news reports about salaries of employees of some department getting delayed. The reason is that we introduced a human resource management system last year and not due to any financial crunch. These departments were reluctant to be HRMS compliant. We asked them to furnish details of their total employees. Eventually, the finance department had to stop the salaries to push them. The result was that the presence of ghost employees was ruled out. There were departments that had almost 500 bank accounts and it was suspected that government funds were parked there.” Staff didn’t face cuts, paid betterPunjab has not imposed any cuts or any delay in the salaries of its employees as has been done in almost 16 states even though the pay scales are 15-25% higher in Punjab than in case of central employees. “I am myself keen that the report of the pay commission is received so that it could be incorporated in the next state budget. But I cannot force them to do it,” he said. On employees being up in arms against the delay in dearness allowance (DA) instalment, Manpreet said one reason for the cost-saving was for giving central scales to its new recruits. Resource mobilisationManpreet claimed that Punjab had undertaken additional resource mobilisation measures like development tax of Rs 200 per month which has generated revenue to the tune of Rs 94.24 crore and Rs 138.07 crore in 2018-19 and 2019-20; implemented social security surcharge on vehicles that has brought revenue of Rs 56 crore in 2018-19 and Rs 53.39 crore in 2019-20 to be used specifically for providing social service benefits; electricity duty in rural areas has also been revised from 13% to 15%; stamp duty on urban property registration has been rationalized from 9% to 6% that has led to an increase in revenue by 4.48% (2017-18) and further by 7.61% (2018-19). He added that other initiatives included shifting of 470 government offices from private buildings to government or semi-government buildings. Punjab didn’t go into overdraftManpreet claimed that prudent debt management through a dedicated debt management unit; investment of Rs 972 crore in the consolidated sinking fund helped the state in saving Rs 10.75 crore in 2017-18, Rs. 21.70 crore in 2018-19 and Rs 5 crore in 2019-20 respectively. Consequently, the state during the current fiscal year 2020-21 has not gone into overdraft for even a single day.

The Times of India

2021-01-07

Chandigarh