J&K employees to get benefits of 7th pay panel
HIGH HOPES FM Drabu presents ₹80,000cr budget, says ‘it will be a potential game changer’
JAMMU: The Jammu and Kashmir government on Thursday unveiled a Rs 80,313 crore budget with multiple sops for farmers and industry while announcing the implementation of 7th pay commission from April, along with 1 per cent DA. It also introduced a slew of new initiatives.
JAMMU: The Jammu and Kashmir government on Thursday unveiled a ₹80,313 crore budget with multiple sops for farmers and industry, while announcing the implementation of 7th pay commission from April 1 with 1% dearness allowance (DA), which has been due to the employees from July 1 last year. As many as 4.50 lakh state government employees and 1.50 lakh pensioners will be benefited with the implementation.
The 7th pay panel had recommended a 14.27% hike in basic pay, raising minimum pay from ₹7,000 to ₹18,000 month.
“Despite being liberal, my budget numbers for the year 2018-19 are looking good. I propose to spend ₹80,313 crore in the course of the year. Of this, ₹29,128 crore is going to be the capital spending. This is by far the highest capital spend in the economy of J&K,” finance minister Haseeb Drabu said in the assembly.
It was Drabu’s fourth budget in a row as finance minister of the present dispensation.
Claiming his figures “looked good”, he said the budget for the next fiscal was a major step towards making J&K a truly welfare state. “It will be a potential game-changer budget full of welfare initiatives,” he added.
“It is perhaps for the first time in the budgetary history of the state that the revised estimates for the current year are much better than the budget estimates presented last year. Revenue estimates envisaged to be ₹9,931 crore, have been exceeded and in the process, we have crossed the ₹10,000 crore mark of own tax collection,” Drabu said.
He informed that from a whopping departmental liabilities of ₹11,000 crores when he took over, of which ₹ 7,000 crore were of power and ₹4,000 crore across all departments, they have come down to just ₹600 crore.
Similarly, power purchase liabilities have been reduced to a little more than ₹3,000 crore.
The minister said the state was facing an unfunded resource gap of over ₹3,000 crore.