Telangana, Kerala top in H1 Capex; UP, Maha among laggards: Report

Telangana and Kerala lead the capital expenditure chart of states in the first half of 2021-22 while the biggest two spenders, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra, are the laggards with not even spending a fifth of the budgeted amount, thereby pulling down the overall CAPEX by states to a low 28.4 percent in the period. While the Centre has budgeted for Rs 5.54 lakh crore of CAPEX in FY22, including Rs 40,374 crore of loans to the states, thus the direct CAPEX would be Rs 5.13 lakh crore for FY22. Of this, the Centre has spent only Rs 2.09 lakh crore during the first six months of the year which is around 41 percent of the target and lower than 56 percent in FY20 and 54 percent in FY19. Of the Rs 5.76 lakh crore by 24 states, the top 10 states constitute as much as Rs 4.45 lakh crore or 77 percent. While UP is the largest in terms of CAPEX planned at Rs 1,14,274 crore, it has spent only 20.8 percent of its Rs 23,803 crore, followed by Maharashtra with a CAPEX of Rs 59,139 crore but has spent only Rs 8,454 crore so far while the smaller states like Telangana tops the list of states with the highest CAPEX spends at Rs 14,814 crore in H1 which is 51.9 percent of the budgeted Rs 28,518 crore for the full year. The other big spenders are MP (46.5 percent of its Rs 39,704 crore Capex budget) and Rajasthan has spent 40.5 percent of the budgeted Rs 26,936 crore, while the other big laggards are Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Bihar, Gujarat, and Andhra.

Source: The Economic Times