Panel needed to help states tide over fiscal crisis: V Narayanasamy to PM Modi

Chief Minister of Puducherry V Narayanasamy on Saturday urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to appoint an expert committee to help states overcome the fiscal situation in the wake of the COVID-19 lockdown.

He told reporters here that he had written a letter to the Prime Minister urging him to constitute immediately the expert committee to go into the poor fiscal condition of the states during the current lockdown and help mobilise funds to meet their commitments. The expert committee should be given a time-frame of one week to come out with its recommendations as to how the Centre could help the states wriggle out of the fiscal crisis and how States could rise to the exigency, he said.

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Narayanasamy hoped the Prime Minister would consider his suggestion and take appropriate action. "I am speaking candidly and making the suggestion for all states which no BJP-ruled state Chief Ministers will express,", Narayanasamy a former Central Minister, said. Already, he said, Puducherry had not been provided the compensation for loss arising out of the implementation of the GST (goods and services tax) here. Union Territory should be included in the fifteenth Central Finance Commission and Puducherry should also be able to raise higher quantum of loan from open market borrowings, he said.

The Chief Minister reiterated that the state governments alone should have the powers to declare which are the zones that should come under green, orange or red. The present system of Centre declaring the zones is not of help to small places like Puducherry, he said. He said there were only three active cases for COVID-19 in the Indira Gandhi Government Medical college hospital here.

Mahe, Karaikal and Yanam regions, all enclaves of Puducherry, have no active cases of the virus and been declared green zones, he said. He thanked the staff of Health, Public Works, Police, Public Health and local Administration departments for the team work which enabled the Union Territory contain the spread of the pandemic.