Delhi budget focuses on education, health

New Delhi, March 28: The Aam Aadmi Party government on Monday presented a “tax-free” budget and rationalised the VAT structure, which may reduce the cost of products such as readymade garments, shoes, watches and electric and hybrid vehicles in the national capital.

Deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia presented a `46,600-crore annual budget for 2016-17, pegging plan outlay at ` 20,600 crore. Expectedly, education, health and transport sectors got the lion’s share of the total allocation.

The budget also proposed to provide drinking water to all authorised and unauthorised colonies by December 2017 through pipelines. Sisodia set aside an amount of ` 676 crore for this.

` 10,690 crore was earmarked for education, a rise of 8.68% over last year. Of this, ` 4,645 crore is for plan expenditure (23%), highest among all the heads.

“Twenty-one new school buildings have been constructed while 8,000 new classrooms are being built. It equals to the infrastructure of 200 schools. Every classroom will have CCTV cameras installed for which ` 100 crore has been set aside,” Sisodia said.

“The government is committed to reducing tax arbitrage and will attempt to keep a uniform rate with neighbouring states.

In several items such as sweets — namkeen, watches, readymade garments, lower tax rate in neighbouring states was causing erosion in the same. We have made efforts to remove such imbalances in our VAT structure,” he said.

Elaborating on its threetier public health roadmap, the government alloted ` 5,250 crore which forms 16% of the total expenditure, against last year’s allocation of ` 4,787 crore.