Three days after Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented her maiden Budget on July 5, Rathin Roy, a member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council (PMEAC), pointed to an anomaly that there was a mismatch in government’s earning for 2018-19 in the two financial documents Union budget and the Economic Survey.
Writing for the Business Standard, Rathin Roy pointed out that according to the Revised Estimates in the budget, the total earning of the government was Rs 17.3 lakh crore for 2018-19 while the Economic Survey presented just a day before estimated the earning of the government at Rs 15.6 lakh crore.
There was a mismatch between the two estimates of the government’s earning for 2018-19 which was Rs 1.7 lakh crore. The mismatch remained largely unexplained by the Finance Ministry
Experts tended to support the Economic Survey figures as more accurate saying that the Revised Estimates are a projection of how much the government is expected to earn while the survey uses provisional actuals (PA), which are updated figures.
In a coincidence, the Reserve Bank of India has decided to transfer an equal amount of surplus corpus to the government.
The RBI, based on the Bimal Jalan Committee’s recommendation, will transfer a total of Rs 1.76 lakh crore to the government. Of this Rs 28,000 crore has already been paid and the rest Rs 1.48 lakh crore will be transferred to the government coffer by the RBI.
A six-member committee headed by former RBI governor Bimal Jalan was formed by the central bank in December last year. The committee was formed to review the Economic Capital Framework of the RBI.
The committee’s recommendations favoured the government’s stand on a surplus corpus with the RBI, which had till now resisted the demand for transfer of additional fund.
However, the coincidental match of the amount to be transferred by the RBI to the government and anomaly in the government’s earning as projected in the budget and the Economic Survey has led to a question ” Is this coincidental match only a coincidence “
A day after the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) decided to transfer a record high surplus of Rs 1,76,051 crore to the government, the Congress party said “looting” the central bank would not help in reviving the economy.
Slamming the excess reserve transfer, Congress attacked the Narendra Modi-led NDA government on Twitter and said: “Rs. 1.76 lakh cr given to the govt by RBI is almost the exact same amount missing from Budget 2019 announcement. Where was that money spent? Why was it missing from the Budget?”
“Looting the RBI like this only devastates our economy further and reduces the credit rating of the bank,” it added.
Following up from his own Twitter handle, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said both Narendra Modi and Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman are clueless on how to solve their “self-created economic disaster”.
