State wants 8% increase in share of funds from Centre

MUMBAI: The state is planning to demand a greater share in funds from the Centre, up from the existing 42% to 50%. This is in addition to a demand for two special grants — ₹50,000 crore for Mumbai’s infrastructure and ₹25,000 crore for backward regions of Marathwada and Vidarbha, as reported by HT.

“These are the main demands that we will put before the 15th Finance Commission on Wednesday,” said a senior finance department official.

Headed by NK Singh, the panel is on a three-day visit to the city since Monday when they met Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor Urjit Patel. Today, it will meet chief minister Devendra Fadnavis, finance minister Sudhir Mungantiwar and other senior officials.

On Tuesday, the panel met leaders from various political parties who called for change in parameters to give a leg up to efficiency and performance while devoluting funds from the Centre. They argued the state had been successively ignored despite high economic growth, but issues such as agrarian crisis and drought — marring the backward regions — were ignored.

“The finance commission should devise certain methods to incentivise better-performing states such as Maharashtra and those which are efficient in tax collection and doing excellent work in human development. These states should not be punished for their efficiency at the cost of equity,” said Ratnakar

Mahajan, who made a presentation on behalf of Congress.

He said the terms of references (TOR) of the panel were framed unilaterally without consulting states and needed revision. The Congress said weightage should be decided based on area and population of the state to determine devolution of funds from 30% to 25% to compensate for the efforts made by the state to achieve progress on human development index (HDI).

Raising the issue of stress on Mumbai’s infrastructure, Shiv Sena member of Parliament (MP) Arvind Sawant said the city accommodates all those who come from across the country and hence the migration flux should be considered while granting it special resources. The centre should step forward to help Maharashtra for development of the city’s infrastructure,

housing, and health facilities, he added.

Opposition leaders also alleged the Goods and Services Tax (GST) council was being misused for political gains and pressed for change of its structure.

Maharashtra unit president of Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and former finance minister Jayant Patil said before GST was implemented, referring of Value Added Tax (VAT) empowered committee, a finance minister of any state used to be the chairperson of that committee and decisions were taken unanimously.

“But in the GST council, chairperson is the Union finance minister and we saw some political decisions in taxations were taken at the time of elections without considering all implications on other states,” Patil said.