The Modi government has spent Rs 91 lakh crore on social sector programmes and infrastructure development over the last eight years, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman tweeted citing a Reserve Bank of India (RBI) report.
The overall developmental expenditure undertaken by the Centre amounted to a whopping Rs 90,89,233 crore (Rs 90.9 lakh crore) during 2014-15 to 2021-22, she posted.
The finance minister said this in response to former finance minister P Chidambaram's comments about the very high collection of fuel tax but less spending on the people.
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Embedding RBI's data in her tweet, FM Sitharaman mentioned the government's total developmental expenditure incurred from 2014-22. She added that in contrast to the Modi government, only Rs 49.2 lakh crore was spent on this during 2004-14, when the Congress-led UPA was in power.
The finance minister also tweeted the details of the RBI data regarding the government's expenditure so far on food, fuel and fertiliser subsidies as well as capital creation.
"The expenditure incurred by the Modi Govt includes Rs 24.85 lakh crore spent so far on food, fuel and fertiliser subsidies and Rs 26.3 lakh crore on capital creation," FM Sitharaman posted.
She added that only Rs 13.9 lakh crore was spent on subsidies over the 10 years of UPA.
Earlier this month, Chidambaram had highlighted that the central government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi collected Rs 26.5 lakh crore from fuel tax collections between 2014-2021, however, the total outgo on PM-KISAN, free food grain, cash allowances to women, and other cash transfers is "no more than Rs 2,25,000 crore - which is less than the annual fuel taxes collected by the Centre alone."
Refuting this, the government said the numbers posed by Chidambaram fall way short of the mark as the development expenditure was nearly four times.
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Sharing a detailed account of the expenditure, the government added that this comprised over Rs 26 lakh crore in the form of capital expenditure to modernise infrastructure and create productive assets, Rs 25 lakh crore for food, fertilizer and fuel subsidies, and Rs 10 lakh crore on social services such as education, health, affordable housing, etc. It is clear then, that the collections from the fuel tax have been put to good use as developmental expenditure, the government noted, adding that it is unfortunate that a former finance minister would miss out on these basic data points.
Chidambaram had taken to Twitter last week to say that in the eight years of the Modi government, the Centre collected Rs 26,51,919 crore as fuel taxes.