Excise from fuel can fund most of central government’s welfare schemes

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The huge amount of revenue of Rs 2.94 lakh crore that the Centre has collected from petrol and diesel in the first 10 months of the current fiscal year is sufficient to cover the expenditure on all the government’s major welfare schemes such as MGNREGA, Ayushman Bharat, Ujjwala, Beti Bachao Beti Padhao, PM Kisan, interest subsidy to farmers, the healthcare budget and Swachh Bharat Mission.

These eight schemes together had a cumulative outlay of Rs 291,701 crore that could be entirely met with the excise collections from these two fuels in this trying year with a lot of money to spare.

The single biggest expenditure this year has been in the job generation programme MGNREGA. Faced with the lockdown and resultant job loss, the Centre had to revise the allocation to MGNREGA upwards from the budget estimate of Rs 61,000 crore to Rs 1,11,500 crore to generate more jobs in rural India.

The next biggest allocation was under the head PM-KISAN scheme at Rs 65,000 crore.

Launched in February 2019, this scheme is designed to provide income support of Rs 6,000 per year (disbursed in three instalments of Rs 2,000) to farmer families.

Another big expenditure for farmer welfare is the interest subsidy paid to agricultural loans. This head needed allocation of Rs 21,125 crore in the current fiscal.

The healthcare budget for the current year was Rs 67,112 crore, while Rs 12,294 crore was earmarked for the Swachh Bharat Mission.

Ayushman Bharat, the health insurance programme, has an allocation of Rs 8,400 crore.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pet programme Ujjwala, that provided free LPG cylinders to BPL women, needed a fund of Rs 8,000 crore from 2015-16 (the year it was launched) till 2019-20.

The allocation in Beti Bachao Beti Padhao was Rs 220 crore.

On March 22, minister of state, finance, Anurag Thakur disclosed the figure of revenue collection for the first 10 months in the Lok Sabha in response to a question.

If annualised, the government can earn as much as Rs 3.52 lakh crore from the excise duties on the two fuels.

During the past few months the government refused to yield to a nationwide clamour to reduce the taxes, arguing that the funds were required for increased spending in different sectors with the economy sliding into the contraction zone.