Chidambaram juggles with numbers to hide UPA's break up with social sector

When the show is not so good, sleight of hand can come to your rescue. And that's what finance minister P Chidambaram resorted to in the budget while announcing hike for social sector schemes.

In his speech, while Chidambaram kept on announcing major hikes for different social sector schemes, in reality he was comparing apples with oranges.

“Hon’ble Members will be happy to know that plan expenditure in 2013-14 will be 29.4 % more than the revised estimate of the current year. All flagship programmes have been fully and adequately funded,” said Chidambaram . Now, at first glance the hike looks impressive, but in reality this hike should have been given on the budget estimates of last year, not on the revised estimates.

The real hike in plan expenditure based on budget estimates of 5.21 lakh crore for 2012-13 comes to only 6.58% at Rs 5.55 lakh crore.This is the lowest hike given in the past four years of UPA government on the budget estimates. In 2012-13 the hike in plan expenditure was 18%.

Such a low hike in the plan expenditure has reflected on the budgetary allocations for the social sector schemes like Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and Pradham Mantri Gram Sadak Yojna. While MNREGA got no increase in its budget and was given only Rs 33,000 crore the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojna's budget saw a decline of 12% decline in its allocation for 2013-14 at Rs 21,700 crore as against the budget of Rs 24,576 in 2012-13.

Jairam Ramesh, the Union Minister in charge of these social sector scheme had to defend low allocations for social sector schemes "Ironically, the poorer states like Odisha, Jharkhand, Bihar, Chhattisgarh and West Bengal that needed to spend maximum have spent the least in schemes like Mnrega, Pmgsy," Jairam said.

Sarva Siksha Abhiyan,another important social sector scheme under the aegis of Human Resource Development Ministry got a hike of only 6% in its allocation at Rs 27258 crore, while Integrated Child Development Services that is aimed at adressing the nutritional needs of the children up to the age of six years got an increase of 11%.

The social sector has received special attention from the UPA government. Some of the schemes were carried forward from the tenure of UPA-1. While the Congress Chairperson, Sonia Gandhi herself has monitored the performance of  these welfare schemes, lack of funds and high fiscal deficit forced Chidambaram to sacrifice schemes that got the UPA government back to power in 2009.