THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Finance Minister K M Mani, while presenting what he termed a ‘correction budget’ in the Assembly on Friday, exhibited the behavioural peculiarities of medieval conquerors.These old-timers first indulge in a blind decimation of all that is existing and then, perhaps as a means to soothe deep spiritual concerns, construct places of worship on the land they had just laid to waste.Mani was equally merciless, and almost as strange.Using sharp scalpel-like words, whose first syllables were given the stress of a gunshot, Mani first attempted a public disembowelling of his predecessor Thomas Isaac’s economic policies.And soon after, like rampaging conquistadors who suddenly turned religious, Mani started invoking the Gods, spoke of St. Alphonsa, Lord Ayyappa and Sree Padmanabhaswamy.An atonement is in order.The budget documents placed on the table of the Assembly speak in different voices.While Mani insists Isaac’s distorted fiscal policies have pushed the state into a dangerous debt trap, the Medium Term Fiscal Policy and Strategy (MTFPS) Statement, a document as sacrosanct as the budget speech, says otherwise.The statement takes into account a number of factors and concludes that all of them indicate that the govt’s debt is sustainable.Take for instance, the debt-Gross State Domestic Product (GSDP) ratio. In Isaac’s 2011-12 budget, it was 29.52 percent.The MTFPS Statement says that the limit proposed by the 13th Finance Commission is a higher 32.3 percent.Or consider the debt-TRR ratio (debt as a percentage of total revenue receipts).“From 2006-07, this ratio has been within the benchmark level of 300 percent,” the Statement says.Seemingly aghast at Isaac’s revenue deficit (RD) of 1.97 percent, Mani said: “This shows how far the state has deviated from fiscal prudence.” “If the RD is above the Finance Commission’s target of 1.4 percent, it is due to the provisioning of pay/pension revision arrears,” he said.And if Mani thought the state’s debt was unmanageable, he has done nothing to soften the burden.In Isaac’s 2011-12 budget, the debt stock was `88,887 crore. Mani’s figure is virtually the same: `88,747 crore.Mani has brought down revenue deficit to 1.81 percent from Isaac’s figure of 1.97 percent. But he has achieved it without increasing the state’s own tax revenue or its non-tax revenue.Mani’s sole revenue hope, with which he intends to bring down the RD marginally, is Central transfers.Mani’s lower RD is predicated solely on the wishful thinking that the Centre will be more generous.Mani seems confused, too.He is neither here nor there in crucial matters like road development, resource mobilisation and inflation.Mani outrightly rejected Isaac’s `40,000-crore road development model, which at its heart was about sourcing untapped private funds, as “impractical”.In turn, he did not offer a plan B; just vaguely said attempts would be made to get funds from Islamic banks like Al Barakah, an Isaac baby.He had no new non-tax revenue mobilisation proposals but loosely said he would rework Isaac’s muchridiculed ‘sand from dams’ model.On inflation, he had nothing much to say. Instead, he scrapped the income support scheme for traditional workers, is silent about the coastal community, took back the extra income placed in the hands of Asha workers and anganwadi teachers and dumped the novel endowment scheme that would have put `10,000 in the account of every new-born. BUDGET HIGHLIGHTS● Indian-made foreign liquor to be costlier ● Pan Parag and similar products to be costlier ● 2% cess on luxury cars priced above `20 lakh ● 2% tax on luxury houses with a plinth area more than 4,000 sq ft ● Rajiv Aarogyasri Health Insurance Scheme to benefit 52 lakh families, including 32 lakh BPL families ● Weekly lotteries to help cancer, kidney, heart and palliative care patients ● Kerala Entrepreneurship Development Mission with a capital of `500 crore to be set up ● Dialysis centres to come up in all district hospitals; dialysis kits to be supplied for `300 ● State Roads Improvement Project to get `5,100 crore ● Super speciality hospital modelling Sri Chitra Thirunal Institute to come up in Wayanad ● New medical colleges to be set up in Kasargod, Idukki, Pathanamthitta and Malappuram ● All welfare pensions hiked to `400 per month ● `25 crore for Kochi Metro, `150 crore for Vizhinjam project, `30 crore for Kannur airport ● Special package for Sabarimala pilgrims ● Special project for protecting temples, ‘kavu’ and ‘althara’
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