The government has decided to trim down the size of next budget as compared to the original one of the outgoing fiscal, altering years old tradition of preparing larger size successive national budgets.
The actual size of national budget for the outgoing fiscal, 2024-25, is worth a total of Tk 7.97 lakh crore. But the size of the upcoming national budget for fiscal (FY), 2025-26, would be Tk 7.95 crore, a Tk 2,000 crore smaller amount than the current budget (FY 2024-25), official sources said.
"The government is preparing its first-ever smaller budget for the next fiscal starting from July after consistently falling short on budget utilization and revenue collection," a finance division official told The Daily Observer on Tuesday.
It will be the country's 54th budget.
Finance Ministry sources said the meeting of the coordination council on budget management and finance and currency exchange rate has set allocation priorities to the health, education, social security sector in the next budget aiming at achieving target of GDP 5.5 and inflation at 6.5 per cent.
They said the current government is emphasizing on providing a feasible and supportive budget to control the ongoing high inflation and make a balance with the central bank's contractionary monetary policy. Besides, the budget size to be reduced to rein in government's unreasonable spending and poor budget utilization capacities of the concerned government agencies and divisions.
Finance Adviser Dr Salehuddin Ahmed said the size of the budget for the next fiscal year 2025-26 will not be unnecessarily large, and the budget speech will also be short.
The Adviser said, "We will make the next budget realistic. We will try to expand business and commerce in the private sector. We will look into the issue of taxes."
"The next budget will give special attention to inflation, employment, social security, and children's education," he said, adding, "We will not increase the size of the budget unnecessarily. Even, the size of the ADP will also not be very large."
Meanwhile, the size of the ADP for next financial year's budget has been estimated at Tk 2.30 lakh crore.
The outline of the budget was presented by Finance Secretary Dr Khayeruzzaman Majumder at the MoF's Coordination Council and Budget Management meeting held on Tuesday.
Finance Adviser Dr Salehuddin Ahmed presided over the meeting.
Senior government officials including the Planning, Commerce, Secretaries and NBR Chairman, among others, were present at the meeting.
