By Our Reporter

With the presentation of the policy document, the government is now busy preparing the budget for the upcoming fiscal year. Finance Minister Bishnu Paudel is consulting with the top leaders of the ruling and opposition parties on the budget. He held meetings with NC president Sher Bahadur Deuba and Maoist chief Pushpa Kamal Dahal.

However, making budget to meet the national needs has been a difficult task this time due to sharp declines in grant and external loans.

When the grant commitments have declined, some important grant supports from USAID have already been curtailed while the fate of the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) has been uncertain with conflicting news about its continuity in Nepal.  When these two programmes are closed, the government needs to spend money to complete the projects initiated under these two grants. When the national budget is insufficient to meet the recurrent expenditure, managing sources for development projects has emerged as a herculean task.

Obviously, the budget crunch is likely to affect the ongoing development projects in the coming years. Moreover, the government has to clear billions of rupees of contractors for the works they completed this and last fiscal years. 

The continuous decline in meeting revenue targets, the decline in foreign grants, an incline in the general sector expenditure since the adoption of the federal structure, an incline in the social security responsibility including pensions for retired government employees, a decline in attracting foreign direct investment and continuous increase in foreign and domestic debts have directly affected the capital sector expenditure. Considering such a scenario, the upcoming budget will be hopeless and it can be an anti-development budget with an additional tax burden on the taxpayers.

Meanwhile, different vested interested business groups have become active and the government, in their interests, is intended to incline import tax on electric vehicles, sources say.