An Uphill Task

Yogi Adityanath aims to overhaul UP fi nances. After the farm loan waiver, will he succeed?

- Anilesh S. Mahajan

Uttar Pradesh Budget is pulling in two opposite directions – populism and austerity. On the one hand, there is the farm loan waiver, announced within days of the BJP government taking charge in March this year but whose precise cost to the exchequer – ₹36,359 crore – has been made clear only with the announcement of the government’s first Budget on July 11. But on the other hand, spending on a number of infrastructure and irrigation projects, some education schemes as well as schemes like the beautification of the Gomti riverside in Lucknow – a pet project of the previous government – has been slashed. There is no allocation even for continuing the much publicised free laptop distribution scheme of the previous government, though the BJP had promised, in its manifesto, to continue with it.

Stopping the laptop scheme, along with other freebie schemes – such as the stainless steel thalis and tumblers the previous government gave schoolchildren on the last dhanteras day – will save the state ₹15,000 crore. “The first thing governments do in a fund crunch is to cut down on social sector spending,” says Pinaki Chakraborty, Economic Advisor to the 14th Finance Commission. “This will obviously impact the human development index, which in any case is not high in UP.” Yet religious tourism has been given a ₹ 1,240 crore boost, with further development of Ramayana, Krishna and Buddhist circuits, providing, in particular, better infrastructure in the pilgrimage towns of Ayodhya, Mathura and Sarnath, respectively.