India's fiscal deficit widens to $76 billion in April-December

01 Feb 2013 Evaluate

India’s fiscal deficit for the first three quarters of the current financial year touched 78.8% of the budget estimates (BE) of Rs 5.14 lakh crore for the entire financial year ending March 31, 2013. As per the data released by Controller General of Accounts (CGA), India's fiscal deficit widened to Rs 4.05 lakh crore ($76 billion) in absolute terms. However, the fiscal deficit in the first nine months of current financial year, is lower than that of 92.3% of the budget estimates (BE) in the same period of previous fiscal.

In the union budget for 2012-13 presented in March last year, the government had pegged the total budget deficit at Rs 5.14 lakh crore, or 5.1 percent of the country's gross domestic product (GDP). In view of the fiscal deficit trend so far, finance minister P Chidambaram for the current year, estimated the deficit at 5.3 percent, up from earlier estimate of 5.1 percent.

Further, this improvement on the fiscal deficit front is attributed to government's measures of rationalisation of expenditure including 10 percent mandatory cut on non-plan expenditure. For the 12th five year plan, the government has rolled out the fiscal deficit road-map in which it estimates the fiscal deficit to come down to 3 percent of the GDP by 2016-17.

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