Thursday, March 20, 2008

Should the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management (FRBM) Act be scrapped?

The Business Standard came out with a very insightful editorial recently. "Should the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management (FRBM) Act be scrapped? For this law seems to be having the perverse effect of making the government hide more and more of its expenditure and not show it in the Budget. The finance minister can then claim that he is meeting FRBM targets, when in truth he is not. Scrapping the law might encourage more honest budgeting."
While Chidambaram claims that he has heroically slashed the deficit, the fact is that if all the "off balance sheet" items are considered including the oil pool deficit, farm loan waivers, the pay commission recommendations and last but not the least, the deficits of state governments, the deficit may cross 7.5-8.0% of the GDP.

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