- General Budget: An annual financial statement and allocation funds to various departments and ministries for different projects.
- Outcome budget: A progress report of different projects of ministries and departments
- Performance budget: Project-wise report card at the end of the financial year of targets achieved and unfulfilled.
- Economic Survey: A report of the state of the economy during the year with macro-economic analyses.
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New Delhi, August 25
Finance Minister P Chidambaram today tabled the first ever ‘outcome budget’ obliquely hinting that the pace of implementation would have to be hastened in some of the flagship programmes of the UPA government in the social sector if the targets were to be met.
The 723-page document, which delineates the progress of the major programmes in light of the annual monetary allocations, made some indirect remarks about the inadequate progress in some of the flagship programmes of the government, including the Sarv Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), the mid-day meal scheme and the food-for-work programme and underlined the necessity for institutionalising a more efficient delivery mechanism.
“The ‘outcome budget’ would be a pre-expenditure instrument to help realise the ministries’ vision through clearly defined outcome as a supplement to current systems built around post-expenditure scrutiny,” he told the Lok Sabha.
The Finance Minister said, “It will further strengthen a citizen’s right to information by putting critical data and information on expected outcomes in the public domain, public scrutiny, which will help ensure value for money”.
It excluded targets for nine ministries, including the Defence, External Affairs, Parliamentary Affairs and the Atomic Energy. The Finance Minister said that government would table a ‘performance budget’ at the end of every fiscal year. The three documents, General Budget, ‘outcome budget’ and ‘performance budget’, read together, would have a much better picture of what had been achieved on the outlays made every year, he said.
“This year, ‘outcome budget’ covers only plan expenditure. In future, our intention is to cover non-plan expenditure also,” he said.
According to the ‘outcome budget’ flood and other natural calamities and supply of foodgrains were the main risk factors for achieving the targets set under the National Food-for-Work Programme. The programme, which would eventually be merged with the rural employment guarantee scheme, had received an outlay of Rs 6000 crore and sought to provide 7500 lakh man-days in the lean season in the most backward districts of the country.
The document, the result of a joint exercise between the Planning Commission and the Finance Ministry, noted that proper updating of village education registers by state governments,
teacher vacancies and absenteeism as the critical lacunae in the implementation of the SSA. The scheme had received a total outlay of Rs 7800 crore during 2005-06 and had set a target of enrolling all 8.13 million out-of-schoolchildren in regular schools.Time over-runs in state governments releasing its share of funds in multiple instalments, logistics and court cases were other major ‘risk factors’ in the implementation of the scheme.
The mid-day meal scheme, which sought to provide regular nutritional food to 11.2 crore children in primary schools, might also run into some teething problems for want of adequacy of supervision and management.
The Accelerated Irrigation Benefit Programme (AIBP) might be delayed as it would critically depend on provision of funds by state governments.
