According to data released by the Controller General of Accounts (CGA) on Tuesday, the Union government's fiscal deficit at the end of October 2021 works out to be Rs 5.47 lakh crore, or 36.3 percent of the budget estimates, due to improved revenue collection.
The current fiscal year's deficit figures appear to be better than the previous fiscal year's, when the gap between expenditure and revenue soared to 119.7% of the previous year's Budget Estimates (BE), owing primarily to an increase in expenditure to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.
The fiscal deficit was Rs 5,47,026 crore at the end of October. The government expects a deficit of 6.8% of GDP, or Rs 15.06 lakh crore, in the current fiscal year. The Government of India received approximately Rs 12.79 lakh crore (64.8 percent of total receipts for BE 2021-22) up to October 2021, which included Rs 10.53 lakh crore in tax revenue (net to centre), Rs 2.06 lakh crore in non-tax revenue, and Rs 19,722 crore in non-debt capital receipts.
According to Vivek Jalan, Partner at Tax Connect Advisory, a multidisciplinary tax consultancy firm, the budgeted GST collection was nearly Rs 1 lakh crore per month, and the mop up has already reached Rs 8 lakh crore in the first seven months of this fiscal year.
According to the data, the Centre spent Rs 18.26 lakh crore (52.4 percent of the corresponding BE 2021-22), of which Rs 15.73 lakh crore was spent on revenue and Rs 2.53 lakh crore was spent on capital.
The fiscal deficit for 2020-21 was 9.3 percent of GDP, which was lower than the 9.5 percent projected in the Budget's revised estimates in February.
As per CAG, the fiscal deficit figure shown in monthly accounts during a financial year is not always an indicator of the fiscal deficit for the year, because it is influenced by the temporal mismatch between the flow of non-debt receipts and expenditure up to that month.