Odisha Govt To Refund Advance Of Rs 1443Cr To Emergency Fund

Bhubaneswar: Finance minister Niranjan Pujari on Friday said that the Rs 1443 cr, which the state government had borrowed for KALIA scheme and other expenditures, will be returned to the Odisha Contingency Fund (OCF).

The government had borrowed Rs 1244.66 cr for KALIA scheme and Rs 6.3280 cr was taken for ex-gratia payment to the riot victims by the order of the Supreme Court.

The minister revealed this while presenting the First Special Supplementary Statement of Expenditure for 2019-20 in the State Assembly.

Similarly, Rs 22.7300 crore was sanctioned towards livelihood and input support to the dairy, fish and poultry farmers and  Rs 169.4064 crore for payment of pension under social security schemes.

“The corpus of the OCF is Rs 400 crore which was enhanced by another Rs 1200 crore through the Odisha Contingency Fund (Amendment) Ordinance, on January 11, 2019, to increase the corpus to Rs 1600 crore to meet the emergent expenditure for payment of incentive to farmers under KALIA scheme as Rule-29 of the Odisha Budget Manual provides that the expenditure on a new service can be met by  the advance from the Contingency Fund pending authorization of such expenditure by the legislature by law,” the minister said.

Subsequently, after expiration of six weeks from the reassembly of the Legislature, the Ordinance had lapsed on March 18, 2019, in terms of the provisions of Article-213(2)(a) of Constitution of  India. Thus the corpus of the OCF got reduced to Rs 400 crore. Now, unless the advance sanctioned from the OCF is recouped early, no money can be sanctioned from the OCF (without any statutory changes) even if it is an emergent nature of expenditure as the entire corpus has been exhausted. “Keeping this in view, it was felt necessary to present the Special Supplementary Statement of Expenditure, 2019-20 for recoupment of OCF advance of Rs 1443.1244 crore,” Pujari pointed out.