Mumbai: Towing the Centre’s line, the Maharashtra government has decided to present its planned and non-planned expenditure in one budget itself. Union finance minister Arun Jaitley had decided to merge the planned and non-planned parts of the budget into one and directed all the states to implement the process.

As part of planned expenditure, the government includes welfare and development schemes, while non-planned expenditure is largely about administrative works and routine expenditure of the government over the period of one year. This includes salaries, loans, subsidies, etc. The planned expenditure is split into revenue and capital components.

Terming this a historic decision, finance minister Sudhir Mungantiwar said it would bring a huge change in the budget presentation. “The size of the budget will increase by merging the planned and non-planned budgets. Last year, the size of the state budget was Rs 56,900 crore and the non-planned budget’s size was Rs 1.82 lakh crore. The exercise would help monitor the non-planned expenditure, which was not the case earlier,” Mr Mungantiwar said.

Sources in the finance department said that the decision might clip the wings of the planning department, or the planning department may be merge with the finance department. Mr Mungantiwar, however, denied any such possibility. “The decision won’t take away anybody’s rights,” he said, in response to a query referring to the Centre’s decision to abolish the Planning Commission, after which the relevance of the planned and non-planned budget was lost.

Money matters
Intending to bring in financial discipline, the finance department has told all other departments to not send expenditure proposals for non-urgent things after January 17. Non-urgent things include expenditure on furniture, stationary, organising conferences, computers and photocopy machines. The proposals that involve more than Rs 50,000 would not be approved by the finance department.