Maha falling behind other states, Budget has no proposals to improve situation: Prithviraj Chavan

The Budget did not offer any structural reforms to redress this rapid deterioration in the states economy, Chavan said.The state is also facing a major agriculture crisis as farmers do not get guaranteed remunerative prices for their produce and there is no assured mechanism to compensate them for any loss due to natural calamities, the former Union minister said.The untimely rains of the last week destroyed crops in entire North Maharashtra and parts of Vidarbha and Konkan but the budget announced no relief, he said.There is no talk of the Dr Swaminathan formula.

Senior Congress leader Prithviraj Chavan on Thursday said the Budget for 2023-24 presented by the Eknath Shinde-led Maharashtra government contained no reform proposals for stopping the deterioration of the state's economy. The Economic Survey report shows that the state has slipped to the fifth place in terms of per capita income, behind smaller states like Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Telangana and Haryana, the former chief minister said in a statement.

''Maharashtra is no longer the leading economy in the country. Our economic growth rate is less than the national economic growth rate. The Budget did not offer any structural reforms to redress this rapid deterioration in the state's economy,'' Chavan said.

The state is also facing a major agriculture crisis as farmers do not get guaranteed remunerative prices for their produce and there is no assured mechanism to compensate them for any loss due to natural calamities, the former Union minister said.

The untimely rains of the last week destroyed crops in entire North Maharashtra and parts of Vidarbha and Konkan but the budget announced no relief, he said.

''There is no talk of the Dr Swaminathan formula. We were hoping that the finance minister would bring a law to guarantee remunerative prices to farmers as was attempted by the Madhya Pradesh government. But that was not to be,'' Chavan said.

''No new large industrial projects have come to the state. On the contrary, many proposed large projects such as Foxconn-Vedanta, Airbus, Bulk Drug Park have been spirited away to the neighbouring state, while the leadership of the state watched silently,'' the Congress leader said.

He also said that the decision to move the proposed International Financial Services Centre from Mumbai to Gandhinagar dealt a body blow to Mumbai's aspirations to remain the financial capital of the country.

When Devendra Fadnavis was chief minister, he had declared that Maharashtra would soon become a USD 500 billion economy and now the government has promised to make the state a USD one trillion economy, but it would take ten years to materialise at the current growth rate of 6.8 percent, Chavan said.

The Budget made announcements of building grand memorials to great leaders, but even today the work for the Chhatrapati Shivaji memorial in the Arabian Sea or Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Memorial on the Indu Mill land in Dadar was yet to start, he said.