Govt short of Rs 6b to pay staff salaries

KATHMANDU, MAR 19 -

The government is short of more than Rs 6 billion to pay the salaries of its employees due to the absence of a full budget for this fiscal year.

The deficit has been caused by promotion, grade increase and a rise in the number of new hires.

Finance secretary Shanta Raj Subedi said that the government lacks money to pay the civil servants, police officers, soldiers and teachers.

The Defence Ministry has asked for more than Rs 2.5 billion to pay the salaries of the Nepal Army, the Home Ministry wants Rs 1.5 billion for the police and the Education Ministry wants

Rs 3 billion for the teachers, according to the Finance Ministry.

“There are requests for more money from other government agencies too, but the amounts are relatively low,” said a ministry official.

The government has allocated more than Rs 80 billion for salaries out of the total budget of Rs 351 billion authorised to be spent this year. The budget is Rs 35 billion lower than the last fiscal year as per the one-third budgetary allocation.

According to the ministry, it has received additional demands for Rs 40 billion mostly for recurrent expenditure after the money earmarked under the current budgetary mechanism became insufficient.

“There is a request for Rs 38 billion for recurrent expenditure and Rs 2 billion for capital expenditure,” said Subedi.

Recurrent expenditure refers to spending on administrative functions while capital expenditure means spending on development activities.

Meanwhile, the Election Commission has demanded Rs 7 billion and the Home Ministry is also expected to ask for a large amount to hold the elections in June.

The ministry has been urging an adjusted budget. “As the existing budgetary allocation has not been enough to meet the requirement, we have been asking for a budget that enables us to adjust the increased demand,” said Subedi.

The ministry is also working to prepare a red book containing a list of the budget allocations under each heading for each ministry. The ministry has not prepared a red book for this year, and allowed the ministries to fix the amounts under different headings on their own.

It has asked all the ministries to provide details of how they have allocated the budget under each heading and the justification for doing so. “Based on the reports submitted by the ministries, we plan to ask the political level to do an ‘adjusted appropriation’ of the budget to meet the deficit,” said an official of the budget coordination division at the ministry.

Source: The Kathmandu Post