The government has presented an ambitious budget of 18 trillion and 60 million rupees by crossing the limit of 17 trillion rupees. The budget is based on populism and distribution-oriented, which has encouraged non-productive sector expenditure by neglecting the infrastructural sector development.
Finance Minister Barshaman Pun presented the budget for the fiscal year 2024/25 at the joint session of Parliament on Tuesday, May 28.
The Minister has allotted 11 trillion 40 billion rupees or say 61.31 percent budget for its current expenditure and three trillion 52 billion rupees for its capital expenditure. Moreover, the Minister has allotted three trillion 67 billion rupees for its financial management. Overall, the budget is heading towards a regressive path.
The basic problem is that the nation has adopted three levels of government distributing salaries, allowances and other facilities to above 36 thousand people’s representatives. The nation, which is smaller than many of the Indian states, has adopted seven provinces and the federal government and provincial governments have become the factories producing ministers and political leaders. Indeed, the present political system has been introduced to manage political workers rather than building the nation. The dark side of the Nepali economy is that the total revenue received by the government is not enough to meet the general sector expenditure, therefore, there left no fund for the capital expenditure, which is also known as the development expenditure. The government, even to manage salaries and allowances, has to take debts, and the debt amount has crossed 24 trillion rupees, now, the government has reached the position of taking further debts to pay back the instalments and interests against the past debts. The nation’s entire revenue is based on customs duty on imports as the economic policy didn’t encourage domestic products, Nepal has turned into a nation that totally relies on imports. Our youths are doing dirty jobs abroad and sending remittances to the country. The nation is spending the foreign currency for imports of vehicles and other luxury items, instead of utilizing the remittance revenue in infrastructural development projects. The budget is a guideline of the economy. If we evaluate the budget, it has guided the economy towards the wrong direction. When the economy is moving towards the wrong direction, it may face an accident.
If the budget discourages imports, the customs revenue will reduce and if revenue is reduced, the government cannot pay salaries and allowances of the civil servicemen and also the political representatives. As a result, the government cannot focus on the industrialization process of the country substituting imports. Thus far, the government‘s economy has already fallen into a trap. To rescue the economy, the present expensive political system has to be scrapped.
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