Finance Minister Surendra Pandey on Thursday expressed confidence that the Maoists would allow parliament to endorse the budget for the current fiscal year despite their continuous obstruction of its proceedings.
The government's failure to pass the budget due to the ongoing parliamentary obstruction has forced it to stop paying the salaries of the ministers. Likewise, people associated with state agencies will also stop getting their pay. No government agency can spend more than one-third of the allocated budget until the budget is passed by parliament as per the Advance Expenditure Bill.
The bill is endorsed by parliament on the day the budget is presented which allows government agencies to spend a third of the budget until it is passed after discussion at the house. The government has got approval to spend Rs. 85.49 billion as per the passed bill.
However, Pandey said that the parliamentary obstruction would be lifted to pass the budget at least. "I have already talked to former finance minister Baburam Bhattarai and asked him to allow the budget to be endorsed," he said at the Reporters' Club.
Pandey added that the government had not been able to pay the salaries of the ministers as their number had surpassed the expected 25-30 ministers.
"The salaries of the Constituent Assembly members and the Maoists' People's Liberation Army housed in different cantonments will also be stopped from this month," he said. "The government will not be in a position to pay even the civil servants from next month."
Pandey said that the government was facing pressure on recurrent expenditure (salary and operation cost) not in the development expenditure. Although the government's policy is to accelerate development expenditure this year, it had failed to get approval from the National Planning Commission for more than a third of the first-priority projects.
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