‘Raising over Rs 30k crore to push Capex, will complete 140 irrigation projects stalled for decades’: Praveen Pardeshi

He added that his role is only advisory in nature and there is no interference with the finance department. “Rather the person who we work closest with, is the finance minister of the state,” he said.

Aiming to push capital expenditure and thereby growth in the state, Pardeshi said, “Capital expenditure in the state is only about 27 per cent. If you aim for a one trillion dollar economy, the investment has to go on capital formation. While we cannot cut revenue expenditure, we are working on raising the capital expenditure without burdening the taxpayer, through off-budget financing… While we are taking Rs 15,000 crore from NABARD for the completion of 140 stalled irrigation projects over the next two years, we are getting about Rs 8,000 crore from Asian Development Bank for building 7,000 km of concrete roads to connect 3,920 villages (with population of more than 1,000) to the national highways. We are also taking Rs 7,000 crore from the BRICKS bank for this project,” said Pardeshi in an interview to The Indian Express.

He said that as these are dedicated funds, they cannot be diverted for other purposes and hence will lead to time-bound completion of projects at hand.

He pointed out that some of the irrigation projects have been going on since the 1980s or 1990s and said that as we are going for a time-bound completion of these projects, there will be no cost escalation.

Pointing out the lack of data to figure out the contribution of districts to the state GDP, the CEA said that he is working on data-driven decision-making. He said that while Mumbai, Pune and Thane contribute 54 per cent to Maharashtra’s GDP, the remaining 32 districts of the state contribute around 46 per cent.

“Our aim is to plan how each of these districts contribute to their full potential. We know the size of Maharashtra’s GDP, but district GDP is a guesstimate, made on a weighted average. There is no bottom-up measurement of the GDP of any district. So, our first task is to have a data-driven decision-making approach for which we are creating the State Data Authority under Maharashtra Institution for Transformation (MITRA). The aim is to have data-driven decision-making and accordingly focus on augmenting their GDP contribution,” said Pardeshi.