Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami has requested Prime Minister Narendra Modi to issue directions to the Ministry of Social Justice to restructure the post-matric scholarship scheme with a sharing pattern of 60:40 between the Centre and the States in line with other Centrally sponsored schemes.
Palaniswami said, earlier the expenditure at the end of each a five year plan period was taken as the committed liability of the State for the next five year plan period. Although the practice of 5 year planning was given up after the end of the Twelfth Five Year Plan (2012-2017), the earlier practice of re-fixing the State's committed liability at the end of five years has been continued. As a result, the committed liability of Tamil Nadu, which was Rs 353.55 crore in 2012-13, with effect from 2017-18, has risen to Rs1,526.46 crore.
"As a result, although the State spent Rs1,689.34 crore on the scheme in 2017-18, Rs 1,910.19 crore in 2018-19 and Rs 2,005.70 crore in 2019-20, it received only Rs162.88 crore, Rs 383.73 crore and Rs 479.24 crore respectively as the Central share for these years. In this year (2020-21), for a total expected expenditure of Rs 2,110.90 crore, Tamil Nadu will be eligible to receive only Rs 584.44 crore as Central share. This has placed an extremely high burden on the State government's finances. It also results in a situation, where what is really a Central sector scheme will be largely funded by the State's from its own resources," he said.
