Home Ministry asks officials to ensure financial discipline

NEW DELHI: The home ministry has asked its officials to ensure expenditure in the current fiscal in no case exceeds the Revised Expenditure (RE) ceiling fixed by the finance ministry after its budgetary allocations were extensively cut earlier this month. “It is informed that in order to promote fiscal discipline, finance ministry is closely monitoring the expenditure figures. It is advised that under no circumstances expenditure should exceed the final RE 2014-15 ceiling,” the home ministry wrote to all its offices on January 19.

The finance ministry has enforced expenditure cuts across government departments at the RE stage, in an effort to achieve the fiscal deficit target of 4.1% of gross domestic product (GDP). The home ministry letter added that the finance ministry had “extensively constricted” the budgetary allocation of the home ministry as the RE stage across all grants.

“In this regard, an advisory has already been issued to all heads of central armed police forces and central police organisations to personally monitor withdrawal/cancellation/amendment of Letters of Agreement with executing agencies, so that expenditure so incurred in well within the budgetary ceilings,” the home ministry letter said.

ET had earlier reported on January 1 that the finance ministry had also denied home ministry an additional Rs 1,500 crore allocation for police modernisation funds at the RE stage. Home minister Rajnath Singh had last year pushed for the Modernisation of Police Forces (MPF) Scheme funds to be doubled to Rs 3,000 crore, the sum announced by finance minister Arun Jaitley in his maiden budget speech.

“The additional allocation of Rs 1,500 crore as per Budget 2014-15 announcement has not been provided under the MPF Scheme at RE stage. Therefore, additional state action plans received from various states will not be considered during the current financial year,” says the home ministry’s letter of December 29, written to Director General of Police (DGP) and principal home secretary of all states, and marked to the Union home secretary and all ministry joint secretaries.