Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday said the industry is in recovery mode and quite a lot of Budget proposals are on course, including disinvestment, despite a fresh wave of Covid infections and local lockdowns.
She said that the Centre was also ready to frontload more borrowing in the first half of the current fiscal to spend more on reforms. The government decided to borrow 60 percent of the total gross borrowing for 2021-22 (Apr-Mar) or 7.24 trln rupees from the market through dated securities in April September.
She assured that the government will support the states in their annual borrowing programmes too, so that they can carry out their spending on generating capital. The borrowing by states in 2021- 22 has been capped at 4 percent of the respective states' GDP, amounting to 8.47 trln rupees.
Out of this, 0.5 percent of the states GDP or 1.06 trln rupees has been set aside to given to only those states who meet a certain threshold of capital spending. In total, the states have to spend 5.79 trln rupees on capital expenditure in order to avail the extra 0.5 percent of the limit.
Sitharaman reiterated that the current focus of the government was on ramping up the speed of vaccination, with a total of 132.3 mln COVID-19 inoculation done till Wednesday. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has assured seamless supply of medical oxygen to states, as well as various steps to ramp up production of Remdesivir.
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