Govt caps April spending at 5%, oppn slams order

New Delhi: Delhi govt has issued directions to all departments to cap spending in April to 5% of the total budget allocation under respective heads for 2025-26 to "map the expenditure" with the available resources and for "better cash management".
In an internal order, the finance department, however, added that expenditure incurred on salaries, allowances and wages, apart from spending on security, sanitation, water supply and electricity, were exempted from the cap.
A senior finance department official said mapping of the expenditure and resources is a regular practice for effective financial management to prevent overspending and underspending under various heads.
Latching on to the order, leader of opposition in the Delhi assembly, Atishi, hit out at BJP govt and called the Rs 1 lakh crore budget "Hawa Hawai" (without much substance). Citing the order, she said at a press conference that with this restriction, the govt can only use Rs 5,000 crore in the first month and, at this rate, will be able to spend just Rs 60,000 crore for the entire year, which will be far short of the Rs 1 lakh crore it promised. "When there's no real money, there can be no real spending and the BJP govt's own directive has exposed that its grand budget is nothing more than a jumla (empty promise)," she asserted.
Atishi claimed that the budget estimates were inflated and the govt tax collection would be short by at least Rs 5,000 crore, while the Centre had not allocated a single rupee to Delhi in its budget. "My estimates suggests that the real size of Delhi's budget might be closer to Rs 78,000 crore. Documents from Delhi's finance department confirm that the govt doesn't even have Rs 78,000 crore. It only has Rs 60,000 crore," she said.
Atishi said that while presenting the budget, chief minister Rekha Gupta repeatedly claimed that it was a historic budget because of its size. "The budget was not historic due to its scale but because it is the most dishonest budget ever presented in the assembly," the AAP senior functionary said.
"BJP's lies have been exposed not by us, but by its own govt order, laid bare before the people of Delhi and the entire country. Today, the very point I raised in my speech in the assembly has been proven to be true through the govt's own order," she added.