Bangladesh Nation Awaits New Govt’s Fiscal Gifts-Budget Today

Finance Minister AMA Muhith is all set to present in parliament at 3pm today a Tk 1,13,815 crore budget for 2009-10 fiscal, incorporating allocations in some new sectors like public-private partnership (PPP) projects and stimulus packages. Budgets for the last two fiscals were presented outside parliament when the country was ruled by a military-backed caretaker government.(The Independent)

The budget, the first by the present Awami League-led grand alliance government, will have a deficit of Tk 34,358 crore, which is 4.79 per cent of the GDP, sources in the Finance Ministry said adding that education, health, rural development, communication, and power sectors would be given the highest priority in the budgetary allocations.

"The safety net for the poor would be heavily expanded in the budget and allocations in different pro-poor programmes would be raised," the Finance Minister has recently told The Independent.

He also said that the tax net would be expanded in the ensuing budget instead of imposing additional tax burden to realise the revenue target.

Presently, the country has nearly 8 lakh taxpayers and the government plans to raise the number to a million.

The Finance Minister has already made it clear that the guiding spirit of this year's budget would be the election manifesto of Awami League, which focused on the pro-poor economic growth through creating massive employment across the country.Original budget for the 2008-09 fiscal amounted to Tk 99 thousand 962 crore which was later revised to Tk 94 thousand 130 crore, sources said.

The revenue target of the proposed budget would be Tk 79.36 thousand crore, of which the revenue from the NBR sources would be estimated at Tk 61 thousand crore, non-NBR revenue Tk 2.9 thousand crore and revenue from non-tax sources would be Tk 15.5 thousand crore, sources said full news......