New Delhi/Patna, May 15: As Lalu Prasad called out for the ouster of the Nitish Kumar regime, the chief minister landed in the national capital to plan for Bihar’s future.
To start with, the economy of the state is set to get a major boost in the current fiscal (2013-14) as public spending on development work would be 34.4 per cent more than what it was in the previous financial year (2012-13).
The Planning Commission today approved the Rs 34,000 crore annual plan of the state in a meeting attended by Nitish and his deputy Sushil Kumar Modi.
In 2012-13, Bihar had got approved a Rs 28,000 crore annual plan which was downsized to Rs 25,628 crore towards the end of the year. For the current fiscal, the state expects Rs 8618.30 crore of central fund under the plan head and would mobilise the remaining from its own resources and borrowings.
Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia was all praise for the Nitish-led government. “Bihar’s overall performance during 2012-13 has been very good and its growth in per capita income has been better than the country as a whole. Though the state started with a low base, this still is a remarkable growth,” he told reporters.
Nitish thanked the Centre for the approval. “We will soon finalise various projects we want to undertake during the current financial year,” he said.
Roads
Nitish later met rural development minister Jairam Ramesh, who promised to approve construction of 4,000km of roads in the state under Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY) during the current financial year.
Ramesh, who called on the chief minister at Bihar Bhavan, assured Nitish that a proposal to this effect would soon be approved officially.
The minister also promised to increase the number of implementation units for PMGSY projects in the state.
Special status panel
Coinciding with the chief minister’s visit to Delhi, the Centre today set up a committee to frame new criteria for backwardness and “special category status” for states.
Raghuram Rajan, chief economic adviser in the finance ministry, will head the six-member panel that has been given two months to submit its report.
Currently, the mountainous border states of the north and the Northeast enjoy the special status that brings higher funding than others.
Today, a finance ministry statement said the panel would look at gaps between a state’s statistics and the national average on per capita income and other human development indicators, and evolve a composite development index.
Among those on the panel are Shaibal Gupta, member-secretary of ADRI, and Indian Statistical Institute professor Bharat Ramaswami.
