Photo Courtesy: India Today Group
Guwahati: A new report from the Comptroller and Auditor General of India details a varied fiscal landscape for Northeastern states during the 2024-25 financial year. While Manipur maintained a revenue surplus and Tripura outperformed its goals to achieve a surplus, Assam and Mizoram fell short of their targets, ending the year with revenue deficits.
These findings are part of a broader national trend where 15 states recorded revenue deficits, compared to 13 that finished with surpluses. Assam and Mizoram were among nine states across the country that failed to meet their original budget projections for revenue surpluses. Mizoram also joined a list of states that received Finance Commission revenue deficit grants, alongside Himachal Pradesh, Punjab and West Bengal.
Fiscal pressure is intensifying across the Northeast, with Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura all reporting significant increases in their fiscal deficits compared to the previous year. Nationally, 18 out of 28 states breached the fiscal deficit target of 3 per cent of Gross State Domestic Product recommended by the Fifteenth Finance Commission.
Committed spending remains a primary driver of these financial constraints. The report noted that fixed obligations like salaries, pensions and interest payments place a heavy burden on state budgets, with Nagaland recording the highest committed expenditure ratio at 74 per cent. As the report concluded, "states collectively have remained in fiscal deficit throughout the past decade, with renewed fiscal stress visible in several regions, including parts of the Northeast, during FY25."
By the end of March 2025, total liabilities for all states reached Rs 90.51 lakh crore. The combined revenue deficit across the 15 states in the red totaled Rs 3.46 lakh crore.
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