Whatever happened to the Covid-19 budget?

At a time when we are floundering in fear and uncertainty amidst a raging Covid-19 pandemic, budget FY 2020-21 has fallen short of making significant allocations to the hardest hit sectors such as health, education, social safety net and agriculture. We are baffled and disappointed that when a budget should primarily have been focused on mitigating the devastating shocks of the pandemic in terms of huge loss of lives, livelihoods, hunger and gaps in education, it has made minimal commitments to these ongoing crises.

Even going by the official death counts and infection rates, it is more than obvious that we are far from controlling the deadly coronavirus. Our already shaky health system is on the verge of a collapse, with hospitals being overwhelmed and patients being refused life-saving treatment. Right now, we need more hospital beds, ventilators, ICUs and isolation units, central oxygen units, more health workers, PPEs, masks. We badly need more testing. Yet the health budget was increased by only 13.63 percent from the current fiscal year's original allocation. So how is the health sector supposed to cope with the exponential increase in Covid-19 infections?

Moreover, it is disheartening that agriculture, supposed to be the second priority of the budget, has received no extra allocation. Why is there no special stimulus package for small farmers who are the hardest hit by the pandemic? How will these farmers, most of whom are out of the banking system and cannot take advantage of the refinancing schemes, get fair prices for their produce? Without recovery allocations targeting these farmers, the possibility of disruptions in supply chains and shortage of food is more real than ever.

That more people have become poorer and the number of "new poor" has increased is obvious, with experts estimating that about 35 percent are now living in poverty. But allocation for social protection to poor households was increased marginally, from 2.58 percent of GDP this fiscal year to 3 percent, which will hardly address the joblessness of an estimated 1.4 million people (ADB). Without investments in skills development, there is little scope for people to get jobs either at home or abroad.

Education, another priority sector that has received very little priority, has been allotted a meagre 2.09 percent of GDP which, obviously, has not taken into account the 4 crore students who are not going to school because of the pandemic. Education experts fear largescale dropout rates and an increase in child marriage as financial hardships will bear down heavily on families during this pandemic. This was, therefore, an opportune moment to ensure that children remain in school and keep on learning through digital or other innovations, that teachers can survive and help their students through this crisis and in the post-Covid-19 scenario.

On top of that, the budget has projected an unrealistic growth rate and unattainable revenue generation target. The finance minister has assigned the National Board of Revenue (NBR) with a near impossible task of collecting TK 330,000 crore—while the NBR chairman has said that tax collectors would be able to collect TK 250,000 crore at best. How this deficit of TK 80,000 crore will be removed, with businesses shutting down or flailing and jobs disappearing in practically all sectors, is surely a mystery.

It is befuddling that the priorities mentioned by the finance minister in his speech—health, education, agriculture as well as creation of jobs—is not reflected in the budget allocations. We can only hope that post-budget review will take these disconcerting deficiencies into consideration and come up with revised allocations that will alleviate the fallouts of the crisis with a realistic, practical approach.