SHILLONG: The North Eastern Council’s demand to hike its annual budgetary allocation to Rs 2,000 crore has fallen in deaf ears as the Centre has indicated that it would sanction only Rs 925 crore for the financial year 2017-18.
North Eastern Council (NEC) secretary R. Muivah said on Tuesday the nodal body for the development of the region was informed about the budgetary allocation on Monday.
Besides, NEC has been given a revised estimate of the additional Rs 120 crore this year and now the total budgetary allocation for the current year for NEC is Rs 920 crore from Rs 800 crore.
“In a way, NEC is like an orphan and champions our cause,” he said, adding that the fund which is allocated to NEC is not sufficient.
Muivah said NEC receives priority list of projects worth Rs 4,000 crore from all the states every year but is getting around Rs 800-900 crore per year.
Stating that NEC has so far utilised 73 percent of its budget, Muivah said NEC has now worked out a draft normative allocation for distribution of funds for the eight northeastern states. This has been prepared taking into cognizance the geography, population and human index of each state.
Under the draft, Assam would get 25 percent of the total funds while Arunachal Pradesh will get 13 percent. Meghalaya, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram and Tripura will get 11 percent and Sikkim will get 7 percent of the funds.
The NEC secretary, however, said the matter is still in the draft stage and it will come into force once it is approved by the plenary council even as he added that the move was initiated following complaints by chief ministers about receiving less fund from NEC.
When asked about which states have utilised the funds to the maximum, Muivah said Sikkim and Tripura are doing well.
The Council is also working on a draft proposal under which NEC would change its funding pattern for projects.
“Now we give 40 percent of the total projects at first go but after the approval of the draft we will give Rs 10 lakh for the project and after tendering process is over, than we will issue 40 percent of the project cost,” he said.
He further said Meghalaya has recently submitted its priority list of projects to NEC and hence the utilisation of funds is quite low. The State is the penultimate on the list to submit its proposal with Tripura being the last.
“If states do not use funds, there are mother states waiting and we will release funds to those states,” he added.
