Economists defer on Bommai’s opinion on guarantees of Cong

NT Correspondent

Bengaluru: Hitting back at the former Chief Minister Basvaraj Bommai’s “Freebies announced by the Congress will land the state in deficit” comment, economists have noted that it will not cause the exchequer to collapse. Bommai termed the Congress’ welfare schemes as freebies and said they will lead the state to a financial crisis.

Economist Soma Valliyappan told News Trail that despite announcing the welfare schemes, which are needed for the people, many states have performed well in terms of better outcomes and have been successful in providing equal accessibility to their people. According to a report by Access (In) Equality Index, 2021, states like Tamil Nadu, Kerala, West Bengal and Telangana performed well and achieved basic socio-economic opportunities for their respective state population.

This denotes how Tamil Nadu performed well despite offering such welfare schemes. Valliappan also termed Bommai’s comment as baseless and added that the non-BJP-ruled states have been performing better than BJP-ruled states. However, Shyam Sekhar, another economist, said that the effective outcome of these welfare schemes doesn’t get any benefit out of growth.

“The balance sheet always looks weaker and they don’t have any measurement of outcome. The parties are not interested in tangible benefits,” he said. At present, the state’s total debt stands at Rs 5.18 lakh crore in FY 23 compared to Rs 2.46 lakh crore in FY18. However, the total liabilities for FY24 are estimated to be around Rs 5.65 lakh crore.