Congress pet project Indira Canteens on the verge of closure
Bengaluru, Aug 27: Indira Canteens, the pet project of the previous Congress government to provide highly subsidised food to the urban poor, is on the verge of closure as neither the state government nor the Bengaluru corporation (BBMP) have made any budgetary allocations.
The Congress has been accusing the BJP of planning to shut down the Indira Canteens, named after former Prime Minister late Indira Gandhi, though chief minister B S Yediyurappa had repeatedly said none of the pro-poor schemes will ever be wound up.
Taking a cue from Amma Canteen in neighbouring Tamil Nadu, the Congress government had started the Indira Canteens in Bengaluru on August 15, 2018 ahead of 2018 assembly polls.
These canteens offered breakfast at Rs 5 and meals twice a day at Rs 10 per plate in the afternoon and night.
During the corporation council meeting on Tuesday, Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike Commissioner N Manjunath Prasad explained to the corporators about the challenges to continue the scheme.
"In the present situation, neither the BBMP nor the state government has allocated budget. If nobody makes any budgetary provision, then there will be a situation to shut it down. Hence, you have to take a call on what to do next," Prasad said.
The threat of closure looms large over 173 Indira canteens and 18 mobile Indira Canteens in the city, where at least 14.47 crore people have had meals, corporation officials told PTI.
Prasad explained to the council that state government funded the Indira Canteen as it was a state governments scheme and not the BBMP's.
In 2017-18, the state government announced Rs 100 crore budget for the project and handed over the entire amount to the nodal agency, which was BBMP, Prasad said.
However, the BBMP had to incur additional expenditure of Rs 24.37 crore to take up various infrastructure works around the Indira Canteens.
The next year, the government allocated Rs 145 crore for the canteens but released only Rs 115 crore whereas the expenditure was of Rs 137 crore, Prasad said, adding that the additional expenses was borne by the BBMP.
"In 2019-20, at the time of approval of the (BBMPs) budget in January, I wrote a detailed letter to the state government saying Indira Canteen was state governments scheme and thus they should reserve Rs 210 crore for this project.
Yet, they did not allocate any funds for Indira Canteen in its budget," Prasad told the council.
He said he wrote three letters from January to June this year but there was no response.
"On the one hand the state government did not reserve any funds for it while on the other, we did not include it in the Palike budget because it was not our scheme but of state government," Prasad explained.
Siddaramaiah, who had launched the project, warned that he will protest vehemently if the canteens were closed.
"The Indira Canteens are for the poor. I have no idea what decision they are going to take about them. If they do so, we will protest very strongly," Siddaramaiah told reporters at Belagavi.
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India should create strategic buffers to navigate 'most difficult' energy shock: CEA Nageswaran
New Delhi (PTI): Chief Economic Advisor V Anantha Nageswaran on Saturday said India needs to create strategic buffers in the face of the "most difficult" energy shock that the country is facing amid the West Asia crisis.
Nageswaran also said the rising prices of fertiliser and petroleum products globally due to the crisis will make it challenging to achieve the 4.3 per cent fiscal deficit target for the current fiscal, while below normal monsoon and pass-through of higher energy prices could lead to "potential inflation spike".
He also said India has employment challenge emanating from AI, and there is a need to ensure that IT sector becomes more competitive and not lose jobs to AI, and instead create jobs that use AI within the IT sector or in other services.
Speaking at the ICPP Growth Conference organised by the Ashoka University, Nageswaran said the current account deficit (CAD) in the current fiscal could rise to over 2 per cent of GDP, from less than 1 per cent in FY'26.
"The ... priority for us is to create strategic buffers. This energy shock is the most difficult one compared to any other previous energy shock in terms of energy lost as a percentage of total global energy supply, not just oil, including gas.
"And we also need to use this occasion to think about other areas where we are vulnerable in terms of import dependence, nickel, tin, and copper. We need to build strategic buffers if we have to make a shot at manufacturing and becoming indispensable," Nageswaran said.
Since the beginning of the war in West Asia on February 28, crude oil prices soared to a four-year high of USD 126 per barrel on Thursday, from about USD 73 level before the war.
Stating that geopolitics will compel policymakers to be nimble and flexible and shed old model of thinking, Nageswaran said India is better prepared than many other countries to deal with the crisis because of the fiscal leeway that the country has due to lowering of fiscal deficit ratio to 4.4 per cent of GDP in FY'26.
Nageswaran said the West Asia conflict is more of a price shock than supply shock for India as the government is managing the supply side deftly.
"This particular conflict, which is going to be on a low simmer or a high flame situation, whatever it is, it is going to be there with us in some form or the other because the military conflict may be over, but the strategic conflict is well and truly alive. It will be so for some time," Nageswaran said.
He said the conflict has four channels of shock: price and supply shock, trade impact, sticky logistics costs and remittance shock.
India imports 60 per cent of its LPG usage and of that, 90 per cent flows through the now closed Strait of Hormuz.
Nageswaran said the pass-through of high global energy prices would have to be a "balancing act". He said some pass-through is already happening in commercial LPG, and the levy of export duty on diesel and ATF.
The government has cut excise duty on petrol and diesel to shield customers from the impact of the rise in petroleum prices. "We are coming around to arriving at a certain modus vivendi with respect to burden-sharing between the fiscal policy side, inflation, households and the oil marketing companies. So it has to be a balancing act," Nageswaran said.
