Odisha, First State To Have A Climate Budget

Bhubaneswar: Odisha became the second state in the country to go for complete e-budgeting as Finance Minister read out his speech from an iPad in the State Assembly on Tuesday.

All MLAs were handed over iPads with pen drive containing budget documents.

“As a green initiative, we are almost doing away with printing of budget documents through introduction of ‘e-Budget’. I am grateful to the Speaker, Leader of Opposition and other members of House for their support to facilitate this initiative. We have reduced printing of about 75 lakh pages of paper which saved about 1000 large trees,” the minister told the Assembly.

“The Budget documents are available in electronic form to all of us in the House and after my speech, the same would be available to general public as well.”

Any individual can download Odisha Budget, the android-based app developed by the government, and access the digital form of the documents in real time once the finance minister presents the annual budget for 2020-21 financial year.

The overarching of the green initiative was seen when the finance minister proposed to introduce a document on “Climate Budget” to provide a brief account of tracking climate public expenditure. “Odisha is the first State in the country to bring out such disclosure,” he said.

It was only the first of the firsts.

Stressing on empowerment of women as well as rights and holistic development of the children, the minister said announced two separate disclosure documents for ‘Gender Budget’ and ‘Child Budget’.

He said that the nutrition for children has remained a challenge across the globe. “We are introducing a separate ‘Nutrition Budget Statement’ with support from UNICEF. This will cover information and analysis on all nutrition specific and nutrition sensitive schemes across the Departments. Again Odisha is the first state in the country to introduce such a document,” he added.