Ministry of Finance asks ministries to be realistic with budgetary requests

The finance ministry has started intimating various ministries and departments to present "realistic assessments" of their supplementary demand for grants for this fiscal year and the budgetary targets for 2024-25, said a person aware of the deliberations.

The government will present the interim budget for 2024-25 in February next year, and the actual budget will be introduced after 2024 general elections, the schedule of which isn't known yet.

The finance ministry will formally start consultations in early October for the supplementary demand as well as the interim budget, he said.


"Departments are being informally conveyed to be realistic in their assessments. For instance, they should not ask for more (for this fiscal) and end up surrendering unspent funds," he added.

"Similarly, (for the interim budget for 2024-25) it's being expected that the departments will firm up proper expenditure projections, at least for the first half," he said.

Given that the precise duration of the budget session of Parliament isn't yet clear (due to the polls), it makes sense for the ministries/ departments to prepare estimates as precisely as possible, he indicated. The idea is to avoid any disruption in productive spending.

Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman had presented the budget for 2019-20 on July 5, 2019, after the last general election.

The Centre may have to reassess the pace of increase in its capital spending for 2024-25, now that private capex has also started picking up. The Centre's budgetary capital spending more than doubled to ₹7.28 lakh crore in 2022-23 from the pre-Covid-19 (2019-20) levels, as it bet big on the high multiplier effect of such expenditure. The capex outlay was again raised sharply by 35.8% for 2023-24 to a record ₹10 lakh crore.

The government had raised its FY24 budget size by 7.5% from a year before to ₹45 lakh crore.

According to the latest data, the Centre's fiscal deficit in the first quarter of FY24 stood at 25.3% of the annual target, higher than 21.2% a year before.

Capital spending surged 59% on-year in the June quarter to ₹2.78 lakh crore. However, revenue expenditure eased marginally to ₹7.72 lakh crore in the first quarter.

Senior finance ministry officials have already asserted that the FY24 fiscal deficit target of 5.9% of gross domestic product (or ₹17.87 lakh crore) will be strictly adhered to even though the spending under a few schemes could vary from the budgetary outlays.