Tripura’s starving fund is nowadays a big concern for the Deputy Chief Minister Jishnu Dev Varma and to heal the status he relys much upon the state tourism, including health tourism, and entrepreneurship. He believes both these can be of significant help for the State in confronting the dual challenge of finance gap and employment generation.
Being a North-East State, more than 85 per cent of Tripura’s Budget depends upon grants from the Centre.
The deputy C M who is also in charge of the Finance department, make the CPI(M)-led Left Front responsible for the plight. According to him the party when was in power went on an expenditure spree, leaving behind empty exchequer without much scope to revenue generation and widened the fiscal deficit to nearly 7 per cent in 2017-18.
Dev Varma revealed, “The Left Front government started nearly 1,000 projects, worth nearly ₹1,600 crore, without much clue to the source of funds. Central funds were spent in creating white elephants – like 2,000-seater town halls in non-descript places – which incur heavy maintenance cost but cannot help revenue generation.”
Regarding the entrepreneurship development and industrialisation, the Left Front Government didn’t do much. Further it offered government jobs to 4.39 percent of population, as against the national average of only one per cent. Though employees were denied of successive pay commission awards; the wage and pension together accounted 64 percent of the total expenditure in FY18.
Added to it, during the BJP rule in the state, pressure on finances increased as the State government implemented a compromised form of seventh Pay commission awards which encountered wages and pensions increasing by a matrix of 2.57.
The delicate financial health hinders any developmental work in the province, so the CM says, “The precarious financial condition didn’t allow us to do more.”
By now, Dev Varma is quite clear about the fact that the State can no longer depend on government jobs for employment generation and to meet the need they have to encourage private entrepreneurship.
A definite solution in this regard is nothing but tourism. The tourism sector of the state was highly neglected in the past, as Tripura doesn’t exist in the tourism map of the country.
Attempting to enhance the sector, the Deputy C M is very much hopeful in developing the religious tourism part at first. He explains, “We do not have the infrastructure or capacity to attract value tourists at this juncture. As a low hanging fruit, we are aiming to develop religious tourism. Even if we can attract a share of the traffic to Kamakhya temple in Assam, which can lay an impact on the local economy as well.”
In near future the Centre is going to approve the proposal of two more airports in the State, which again will open the potential to develop leisure or adventure tourism in the hilly tribal dominated parts of this third smallest state of India.
