State govts slacking up on spending Budget allocation for social sectors
The Central government has two ongoing programmes relating to education and healthcare — the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) and the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) — and according to the audit performance of the programmes by the Accountability Initiative of the Centre of Policy Research, it can be seen that though the government has been constantly increasing outlays, the expenditure and outcomes are lagging far behind.
For instance, during the Eleventh Five-Year plan, the Central government’s budget for SSA increased nearly three-fold from R21,360 crore in FY 2007-08 to R61,734 crore in FY 2011-12. In fact, during this period, the per-student allocation has more than tripled from an India average of R1,598 in FY 2007-08 to R4,746 in FY 2011-12. However, expenditure has failed to keep pace as only 61% of the allocation was spent in FY 2011-12.
There are other deficiencies in the actual implementation of the programmes by the state governments. There is a large number of vacancies in key posts such as block resource coordinators. For instance, in FY 2011-12, 60% of the BRC posts in Bihar and 58% on Orissa were
Be the first to comment.
