KATHMANDU, April 27: Various bodies returned more than five billion rupees in budget allocations, citing their inability to spend the budget set aside for the current fiscal year.
The Ministry of Finance reported that more capital budget was returned than recurrent budget. An institutional analysis showed that the Ministry of Energy, Water Resources and Irrigation, and the Millennium Challenge Account Nepal Development Committee (MCA-Nepal) returned the highest amounts.
Ambika Prasad Khanal, spokesperson for the Ministry of Finance, said that various bodies returned 53.4 million rupees in recurrent budget and 5.03 billion rupees in capital budget.
In the recurrent category, the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology returned 9.50 million rupees, the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation returned 3.90 million rupees, the Election Commission returned 24.20 million rupees, and the Ministry of Land Management, Cooperatives and Poverty Alleviation returned 15.80 million rupees.
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The Ministry of Energy, Water Resources and Irrigation returned the highest amount under the capital budget category, totaling 2.35 billion rupees. Khanal said that MCA-Nepal returned around 2 billion rupees.
The Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Supplies returned 367.80 million rupees, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs returned 300 million rupees, and the Office of the Auditor General returned 16.10 million rupees in capital budget.
The Financial Procedures and Fiscal Responsibility Act and its regulations require agencies to return unspent budget allocations to the Ministry of Finance by mid-March if they cannot spend the funds by mid-March and are unlikely to spend them within the remaining fiscal year.
Last year, MCA-Nepal returned 70 percent of its budget, and this year, it has returned about 58 percent. Uncertainty surrounds whether the U.S. The government will continue its assistance to the project, while the government's allocated budget for the project remains largely unspent.
For the current fiscal year, MCA-Nepal received a budget of 13.36 billion rupees. Of this, 9.90 billion rupees was expected to come from Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) grants, while the remaining 3.45 billion rupees was to be covered through internal sources. However, as MCA-Nepal failed to spend the budget, it returned about 58 percent of the amount meant to be covered by internal sources to the Ministry of Finance.
MCA-Nepal showed weak spending not only in the current fiscal year but also in the previous one. It spent only about 30 percent of the total budget allocated for the previous fiscal year and returned the remaining 70 percent.
For the projects under MCA-Nepal, the government allocated 10.84 billion rupees, but MCA-Nepal returned 7.60 billion rupees. The slow progress in land compensation distribution and acquisition for the electricity transmission line construction prevented the budget from being spent as planned.
