To meet deadline, panels to give Budget 2014 a miss

NEW DELHI: The Union Budget, to be presented by finance minister Arun Jaitley on July 10, will not be scrutinized by department-related standing committees due to paucity of time.

With the vote on account due to lapse on July 31, the Modi government's first budget will be debated and passed before this date without going through the usual committee route.

Usually the Union Budget is examined by standing committees during a four-week recess in the two-month budget session that gets under way in February except when elections intervene and an interim budget is passed.

Keen to get the budget proposals passed at the earliest so that the policy and tax measures get the Parliament's stamp of approval, the government is going to request parties to skip the committee process.

Early approval will, the government hopes, imbue its policies with greater credibility and improve the pace of domestic and foreign investments.

The government has otherwise planned a fairly long Parliament session with an anticipated 28 sittings between July 7 and August 14.

The agenda will include approval of four ordinances including one dealing with transfer of several tribal-dominated villages in Bhadrachalam area of Telangana to Andhra Pradesh. The move has been opposed by Telangana on the grounds that the related Polavaram project will leave it to deal with problems of rehabilitation.

Odisha and Chhattisgarh have raised similar apprehensions while Andhra Pradesh sees the project as vital to the economic development post its partition with Telangana.