Karnataka Budget 2023: Know here expected highlights

Congress legislative party meeting underway ahead of budget presentation today. CM Siddaramaiah, Deputy CM DK Shivakumar and other ministers are also present at the meeting. Karnataka Budget 2023: Know here expected highlights. Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah will present the state budget today i.e. July 7 at 12 pm, the first after Congress assumed power in the state.

This would be Siddaramaiah’s seventh Budget as a chief minister. Earlier in the month of February Former Karnataka Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai had presented the State Budget for the financial year 2023-24.  The budget assumes significance as the CM has to make provisions for the five guarantees, which his Congress party had announced before the assembly elections.

The implementation of the five poll guarantees is expected to cost the state exchequer an estimated Rs 60,000 crore annually. The Chief Minister had already said that some strict austerity measures will be announced. He has hinted that the size of the budget this year could be about Rs 3.35 lakh crore.

The exercise to ‘de-saffronise’ textbooks may also invite the BJP’s ire during the session. The Siddaramaiah government will make budgetary provisions for its five guarantee schemes, namely Gruha Jyoti (offering up to 200 units free electricity for residential purposes), Gruha Lakshmi (promising Rs 2,000 to women heads of BPL/APL ration card holders).

Anna Bhagya (Promising 10 kg rice to each member of BPL ration card holders), Yuva Nidhi (offering Rs 3,000 to unemployed graduates and Rs 1,500 to unemployed diploma holders who passed this academic year, for 24 months) and ‘Shakti’ offering free bus rides to Karnataka women across Karnataka in non-luxury government buses.

The Karnataka government is likely to table a bill scrapping the anti-conversion law called Karnataka Protection of Right to Freedom of Religion Act, 2022, which was promulgated by the previous BJP government. According to some Congress insiders, the government will also introduce a bill scrapping the anti-cow slaughter law called Karnataka Prevention of Slaughter and Preservation of Cattle Act, 2020.

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