Mumbai, March 8: Pre-election sops like the Ladki Bahin scheme is extracting Rs 60,000 crore from the Maharashtra government and attempts are being made to ensure that it doesn’t impact capital investments, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has said.
Assembly elections were held in Maharashtra in November 2024.
Days before the announcement of the state budget on Monday, Fadnavis said Maharashtra is trying to channelise the money paid to the beneficiary women into productive purposes by helping them pool the resources for sustainable businesses.
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“It is true that when you undertake such expenditure (on welfare schemes), it has a stress on the budget but we are able to manage it. And we are attempting that this does not impact our capital investments,” Fadnavis said at a Moneycontrol event on Friday evening.
“We are trying to balance budget without reducing the capital investment,” he added.
It can be noted that the sops have been widely credited for being among the factors leading to the MVA government’s success in retaining power, but concerns have also been raised about the fiscal impact of such payouts.
Fadnavis said his government looks at this as a “social sector investment”, and cited one example of the money being channelised through a women’s group, which needs to be replicated.
The chief minister said a bunch of women beneficiaries in his home district of Nagpur have pooled in money to create a corpus of Rs 30 lakh which is being given as loans to women entrepreneurs for starting their businesses.
Maharashtra is seeking to create such “finance societies” in every part of the state, he said, adding that the government’s aim is to create 1 crore “Lakhpati Didis” or over a crore women earning Rs 1 lakh or above.
Meanwhile, Fadnavis said the state has paid a huge price for resisting the mega-refinery project.
Fadnavis admitted that there is a proposal to split the project into three parts of 20,000 metric tonne per annum each, and he also met the central government recently with a request to have the project in Maharashtra.
He said 75 per cent of work on the survey of dwellings in the Dharavi slum is complete and the entire work will be completed by April instead of March as planned earlier.
Asserting that Maharashtra is the defacto data centres and fintech capital in the country, Fadnavis said there is a “reverse migration” of startups from Bengaluru to Mumbai at present.
He said the state is also attempting to be chosen for setting up EV maker Tesla’s manufacturing plant.
Every state tries to get foreign direct investment (FDI), he said, adding that flows into Maharashtra were three times that of Gujarat and missing out on a single project should not be extrapolated as the state falling behind. (PTI)
