Leader of Opposition Jai Ram Thakur on Thursday questioned the Himachal Pradesh government’s supplementary budget for 2025–26, amounting to Rs 40,461 crore, and said it was surprising that the total budget for the fiscal year had touched Rs 98,000 crore.
Talking to mediapersons, he said the supplementary budget presented this year was more than the cumulative supplementary budgets of many previous years. He said the supplementary budget this fiscal was around 69 per cent of the main budget, which was unexpected.
He said copies of the supplementary budget were not provided to opposition MLAs. The document could not be downloaded either. “The document was not laid in the House at all. This has never happened before. The Speaker also did not ensure that the document was given to the opposition. There was an attempt to hide the huge amount in the supplementary budget. The government has prevented us from discussing the issue,” he said.
He said the supplementary budget was the additional budget, which the government spends over and above for necessary things. “It is routine, but we never expected it to be of such a huge amount. The government has spent public money in the wrong way and has now hastily got it regularised by passing the supplementary budget,” he said.
Thakur said the fiscal management of the Congress government in Himachal had collapsed and it had failed to show any fiscal discipline or prudence. He said expenditure on development was less than 4 per cent, which proved that development work had come to a halt in the state. The Leader of Opposition said the Congress government had not spoken the truth, either inside or outside the House.
Earlier, before the session started in the morning, the BJP Legislative Party held a protest in the Vidhan Sabha complex. They alleged that the government was protecting the mining and forest mafias in the state and was not taking action in cases of illegal tree felling, whether in Una or Shillai.
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