P T R Palanivel Thiaga Rajan to release white paper on Tamil Nadu finances on Monday

Tamil Nadu Finance Minister P T R Palanivel Thiaga Rajan will on Monday release a white paper on the state’s finances which the new DMK government says the previous AIADMK dispensation had “mismanaged” in a big way.

Thiaga Rajan will release the 120-page report at a press conference at Fort St George, the seat of power of the Tamil Nadu government, at 11.30 am on Monday. The white paper is being billed as the precursor to the revised Budget to be presented by Thiaga Rajan in the Assembly on August 13.

Sources said the white paper will throw much light into the “financial mismanagement” of the previous AIADMK Government which ruled Tamil Nadu from 2011 to 2021. The DMK, which was the principal Opposition then, had promised to release a white paper on the state’s finances.

The white paper is expected to dwell on how Tamil Nadu plunged into a state that has huge debts. The state government's debts that stood at Rs 1.30 lakh crore in 2011 when the DMK handed over the baton to AIADMK has now gone up to Rs 4.85 lakh crore.

This amount would go further up if interest payments and liabilities of state-level public sector undertakings (SPSUs) are taken into account. The debt is likely to be revised in the Budget.

Thiaga Rajan himself had said an effectively revenue neutral or revenue surplus state from 2004 to 2014 suddenly started having record revenue deficits each year and consequently exploding debt.

“After taking over the department, I realised that much of the financial mismanagement was the result of sleepwalking, not because they consciously made bad decisions. As things began to slide, nobody bothered to check what was happening and nobody even cared to correct the mistakes,” he had told DH in an interview in June.