Around 95 pc of total market borrowing target of Bengal govt for 2025-26 to be exhausted in December

Kolkata, Oct 10 (IANS) The West Bengal government will exhaust 95 per cent of its market borrowing target for the entire financial year of 2025-26 in December this year.

According to insiders from the finance department, the state government is all set to borrow Rs 29,000 crore from the market in the three months of October, November, and December of 2025, with the maximum borrowing to be in December at Rs 15,000 crore, followed by Rs 11,000 crore in November and Rs 3,000 crore in October.

With the state government having already borrowed Rs 49,000 crore from the market in the first six months of the current financial year of 2025-26, that is till September 30, 2025, with the fresh market borrowing of Rs 29,000 crore in the last three months of the calendar year of 2025, the total borrowing as on December 31 this year will be Rs 78,000 crore.

This means that by December 31, 2025, the state government will be borrowing almost 95 per cent of its targeted market borrowing of Rs 81,972.33 crore for the entire financial years 2025-26.

This also means that during the three months of the fiscal year under review, that is, in January, February, and March of 2026, the state government will be left with less than Rs 4,000 crore to borrow from the market, unless it chooses to borrow beyond the limit fixed under the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management (FRBM) Act for any state government.

The FRM Act limits the combined debt as well as the net debt up to a certain percentage of Gross State Domestic Product (GSDP).

As per the state budget documents for 2025-26, the West Bengal government is scheduled to end the fiscal year under review with an accumulated debt of around Rs 7.72 lakh crore, which is 9.21 per cent higher than the figure of Rs 6,30,783.50 as on March 31, 2025, and as per the revised estimates for 2024-25.

Incidentally, at the end of the financial year 2010-11, which was the last financial year under the previous Left Front regime, the total accumulated debt was little over Rs 1.90 lakh crore.

The total debt repayment figure as per the budget estimates for 2025-26 has been pegged at Rs 32,732.08 crore, marginally higher than the figure of Rs 31,013.45 crore as per the revised estimates for 2024-25.

Economists feel that such projected accumulated debt figures are inevitable in a situation where there is no concrete proposal for generating higher state tax revenue, while there are huge revenue expenditures on account of different social welfare and dole schemes.

The two parallel factors, namely skyrocketing revenue expenditure and limited avenues of state tax revenue generation, are extremely difficult to manage at the same time, say economists.

--IANS

src/rad