Former Minister Rana Criticizes Ambitious Budget, Cites Debt and Infrastructure Imbalance

Kathmandu. Former Minister of State for Finance and Nepali Congress Assistant General Secretary Uday Shumsher Rana has commented that the government's budget for the upcoming fiscal year is excessively ambitious. 

He stated that the size of the budget for the upcoming fiscal year has been brought by increasing it by approximately 25 percent from the revised budget of the current fiscal year. He said that there is an imbalance between debt and infrastructure expenditure in the budget. Although the government has set a target of raising a large amount of domestic and foreign debt, he commented that sufficient budget has not been allocated for infrastructure development accordingly. 

The government has stated that it will take a loan of 6 kharba 57 arab rupees in the upcoming fiscal year, while 4 kharba 31 arab rupees have been allocated for infrastructure development. Former Minister of State for Finance Rana warned that if the debt is not spent in productive sectors, it will create further problems in repaying the debt in the future. He also expressed the opinion that it will be difficult to achieve the target, stating that poverty reduction and issues of the deprived class have not been effectively included in the budget. 

He commented that the government has not been able to bring anything new regarding youth employment and startups.  He also said that there will be problems in achieving the government's target of 7 percent economic growth.