A disclosure from the Agriculture Ministry has exposed a curious pattern: even though the government has increased the ministry’s funding in the last five years, an incredible surrender of more than Rs 1 lakh crore occurred in the last 5 years
The Department of Agriculture & Farmers’ Welfare (DA&FW) forfeited a significant amount of Rs 21,005.13 crore from its annual allotment of Rs 1.24 lakh crore in the previous fiscal year (April 2022–March 2023), per the document headed “Financial Overview for the Fiscal Year 2022-2023.” This astounding quantity is over four times the amount that the department produced in the previous year 2021–2022. The year 2021-22 has Rs 5,152.6 crore of its Rs 1.23 lakh crore allocation.
The department relinquished Rs 23,824.53 crore in the fiscal year 2020–21, Rs 34,517.7 crore in 2019–20, and Rs 21,043.75 crore in 2018–19. The regular forfeitures of such enormous amounts of money raise questions about the ministry’s financial management practices and the reasoning behind them.
Under the ministry’s auspices, the Department of Agricultural Research and Education has forfeited an astounding amount of Rs 9 lakh from its overall budget of Rs 8,658.91 crore for the fiscal year 2022–2023. Amounts of Rs 1.81 crore in 2021–22, Rs 600 crore in 2020–21, Rs 232.62 crore in 2019–20, and Rs 7.9 crore in 2018–2019 were the manifestation of this relinquishing tendency.
About the same time as the PM Kisan Samman Nidhi was launched in the 2018–19 fiscal year, the combined budget of the two organizations under the Agriculture Ministry saw a significant increase. It burgeoned from Rs 54,000 crore (constituting 2.3% of the Centre’s entire budget of Rs 24.42 lakh crore) in 2018-19 to Rs 1.32 lakh crore (representing 3.5% of the overall Rs 39.44 lakh crore during 2022-23).Over the previous five years, the annual budget for the plan has been constantly between Rs 20,000 crore and Rs 75,000 crore, in keeping with the seasonal offering. Thinking about the underlying dynamics and fiscal prudence guiding these financial allocations is brought up by this fiscal pattern.The government, however, somewhat cut the ministry’s total budget to 1.25 lakh crore during the current financial year 2023-24 from Rs 1.32 lakh crore in 2022-23, probably due to non-utilisation of funds.
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