Naya Nepal Naya Blog

The government is on homework to announce a budget of nearly 350 billion rupees for the upcoming fiscal year 2010/11, Finance Minister Surendra Pandey revealed Saturday.
Speaking at a programme in the capital Saturday, minister Pandey said that 80 percent of the budget would be drawn from internal sources while the rest would be covered by foreign aid and loan.

He said agriculture, tourism and education would be given high priority in the upcoming budget and the successful programmes of the current fiscal year would get continuity.

The Finance Minister's projection comes at a time when economists are suggesting the government not to bring an over sized budget given the lack of capacity of state mechanism to spend the budget properly.

On the other hand, the main opposition Unified CPN (Maoist) has already declared that it would not allow the government to present the budget in the parliament. Some UML leaders have also said the government is in a caretaker position following the three-party agreement of May 28, which stated that the Prime Minister would resign from his post "at the earliest" to pave the way for a national unity government.