.@OnReality_Check | Former chief statistician Pronab Sen on the 'missing' Rs. 1.7 lakh crore hole in India's Budget



Watch full show here: https://t.co/ElbLXbHJbq pic.twitter.com/mZPREyxpMV — NDTV Videos (@ndtvvideos) July 8, 2019

A discussion on television news channel NDTV has highlighted a serious discrepancy in the Union Budget presented in Parliament on July 5 by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman. According to some experts, there is a massive “Rs 1.7 lakh crore hole in India’s Budget”.

News anchor Sreenivasan Jain quoted member of Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council member Rathin Roy, who was the first to pick up the anomaly. In his article for Business Standard, Roy had said that after studying the Budget and the Economic Survey, he found out that the revenue estimates, that is, how much the government has earned in 2018-19, in the Budget are Rs 1.7 lakh crore higher than those in the Economic Survey.

According to the “revised estimates” used in the Budget, the government earnings for 2018-19 were Rs 17.3 lakh crore. However, the Economic Survey uses “provisional accounts”, which are a more accurate estimate of government earnings, and this puts the figure for 2018-19 at Rs 15.6 lakh crore.

Commenting on the gap, former chief statistician Pronab Sen said that if this incident had taken place in a company, the Chief Financial Officer of the organisation would have lost his job.

According to PTI, Sitharaman later said in Parliament, “The data which is given in the Budget is 100 per cent above board...there need not be any speculation on the figures which have been given out. Every number is authentic.”

Watch the complete discussion here: