Money
House endorses 3 budget-related bills
The Parliament on Friday ratified three bills to facilitate full implementation of the budget for this fiscal year.The Parliament on Friday ratified three bills to facilitate full implementation of the budget for this fiscal year.
The government on Thursday tabled Financial Bill, Bill to Raise Public Debt, and Loan and Guarantee Bill.
These bills were previously rejected by parliamentarians of Nepali Congress and Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Centre), among others, to show they had lost confidence in the then government led by KP Sharma Oli.
The incumbent government, however, tabled the bills without making any change to the content prepared by the previous government, a senior official of the Ministry of Finance told the Post.
Prior to tabling the three bills, the government on Thursday proposed suspension of rule numbers 114 (1), 119, 120, 127 (1), 142 and 152 (1) from the Legislature-Parliament Regulation.
The proposal was made as the government was tabling the bills for the second time in the same session of the Parliament — which the rules barred. This had created a hurdle for the incumbent government to table the bills, because the same session of House has been continuing since the bills were first rejected.
The proposal to suspend the rules was endorsed by a majority of parliamentarians on Thursday.
After presenting a budget of Rs1,048.9 billion on May 28, the government had forwarded four Bills — Appropriation Bill, Financial Bill, Bill to Raise Public Debt and Loan and Guarantee Bill — to Parliament to facilitate budget implementation. Of these Bills, only Appropriation Bill has been signed into law.
Appropriation Bill is considered as the main budget document, which allows the government to implement budgetary programmes and utilise funds as per the allocations made. Because of appr- oval of this bill, the government was not worried about rejection of three other bills.
Of the three rejected bills, Financial Bill allows the government to collect taxes-the main source from which the government generates revenue to finance programmes laid in the Appropriation Act.
The Loan and Guarantee Bill, on the other hand, allows the government to borrow funds from foreign financial institutions, including the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank.
This Bill has proposed that the government’s foreign debt ceiling be raised to Rs700 billion from existing Rs500 billion.
The Bill to Raise Public Debt, meanwhile, allows the government to obtain loans from inside the country. The government plans to raise Rs111 billion in loans from the domestic market in the current fiscal year.