States, UTs owe Rs 49,912.37 cr to paramilitary forces, says MHA

States and Union Territories owe Rs 49,912.37 crore to paramilitary forces, and of this, they owe a whopping 88%, or Rs 44,083.51 crore, to the CRPF alone, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has told a Parliamentary panel.

The huge dues from states have prompted the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs to ask the MHA to adopt a firm view and reach out to states on a monthly basis and get the pending bills cleared at the earliest.

According to the report on the Demand for Grants for MHA tabled earlier in Parliament, a "substantial amount" is outstanding against various states and Union Territories as of October 1, 2022, for the deployment of paramilitary forces.

The committee recommended that the government take the necessary steps to recover the pending dues from states in a time-bound manner. It further asked the government to apprise the reasons given by the state and UT governments for seeking waivers of deployment charges and the MHA's stand on this.

The MHA told the committee that it has been making requests on a quarterly basis to the states concerned to clear their outstanding dues while issuing deployment orders.

Asked about states that requested waiving the charges, the MHA has said that such requests were received from Goa, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Nagaland, Mizoram, Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Maharashtra, Tripura, and Jammu and Kashmir.