Towards the fag end of her long budget speech embellished with poetry, Deputy Mayor Rakhi Ravikumar recited the line Paranjathil paathi pathirayi poyi (Half of what was said have gone to waste), making some honest admission that the city Corporation was able to fulfil only around half of the promises from the previous year.
The city Corporation’s ₹1,213.22-crore budget for the financial year 2019-20 is a balancing act between social welfare, infrastructure development, and service delivery. The estimated expenditure witnesses a jump from the ₹1,098.89 crore last year, out of which the Corporation managed to spend ₹728.73 crore, as per the revised estimates.
The revised surplus in the previous year’s revised budget is a mammoth ₹311.2 crore, while this year, it is estimated to be ₹72.8 crore.
As the planning process has been advanced by several months this year for the first time, the budget has quite a few items that were in the Plan document prepared earlier this year.
With projects under major schemes such as Smart City and AMRUT being kept out of the speech, the biggest outlay of ₹70 crore is set aside as the Corporation’s share for the various housing projects, with the ‘Snehasadanam’ project having housing for all by 2020 as its aim.
The Soubhagya Deepam project, with an outlay of ₹9 crore, is to provide free solar electricity connection to all Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY)-LIFE beneficiaries.
The next big outlay is for the coastal area and the fish workers in recognition of their bravery during the floods.
An amount of ₹15 crore is set aside for various welfare measures, including a foodgrain kit during off-season.
For the renovation of houses and flats of fish workers, an amount of ₹5 crore has been set aside.
Renovation of colonies of those belonging to Scheduled Castes gets an outlay of ₹12 crore.
A new water treatment plant near the Vellayani lake gets ₹5 crore, adding to the ongoing work for a similar plant at Aruvikkara.
The Namaste Ananthapuri project to provide free-of-cost food to those visiting the city for various purposes gets ₹2.5 crore.
‘Only two days ago’
The Opposition parties raised the criticism that the ‘Hunger-free city’ to provide food in hospitals, proposed in the budget last year, was inaugurated only two days ago.
An amount of ₹1 crore has been set aside for processing meat waste, without explicitly mentioning the long-pending slaughterhouse project. Plastic recycling unit at a cost of ₹1.36 crore, a pet-bottle crushing unit at ₹27 lakh, and an outlay of ₹50 lakh for tricycles, e-carts and solar carts for waste collection are other major waste-management-related projects.
Several projects with a ‘healthy’ tag, meant for physical and mental well-being of citizens, including a pre-marital counselling centre, gets a total allocation of ₹2.5 crore.
A project for improving infrastructure in government schools gets an outlay of ₹7 crore.