Panel Set Up To Consider Scrapping Rail Budget To Submit Report In 7-10 Days
Government is preparing the groundwork to end the practice of a separate Railway Budget.
A working group headed by the Joint Secretary (Budget) will submit its report on merging the railway budget with the union budget to finance minister Arun Jaitley in the next seven to ten days, a senior finance ministry official told BloombergQuint.
The finance minister will then take a call on whether to break the 92-year old tradition of presenting a separate railway budget, by merging it with the union budget, another finance ministry official said.
Earlier this year, a committee headed by NITI Aayog member Bibek Debroy, in a report titled ‘Dispensing with the Railway Budget’, recommended that the railway budget should be merged with the general budget.
BloombergQuint had reported on August 10 that the merger of the two budgets is unlikely to create any issues, since it only entails an additional demand for grants for railways once it is merged with the Union budget. The merger of the two budgets will be procedural in nature and won’t have any impact on the government’s budget calculations.