India's half-year fiscal deficit crosses 91% of full year target

New Delhi: The Indian budgetary fiscal deficit over the first half of the current financial year -- at Rs 4.99 lakh crore - stood at 91.3 per cent of the full year`s target of Rs 5.46 lakh crore, official data showed here on Tuesday.

The data furnished by the Comptroller General of Accounts (CGA) showed that April-September fiscal deficit was 83.9 per cent of the budget in the like period of the last fiscal.

According to the CGA data, tax revenue during the period under review was Rs 6.23 lakh crore, or 41.1 per cent of the estimates, while total receipts -- from revenue and non-debt capital -- during the fiscal`s first half were Rs 6.50 lakh crore, or 40.6 per cent of the estimates for the current year.

The 2017-18 deficit -- the difference between revenue and expenditure -- has been pegged at Rs 5.46 lakh crore for 2017-18, as compared to the deficit of Rs 5.34 lakh crore for the last fiscal.

The revenue-expenditure dynamic can be said to have improved over the previous month when the April-August fiscal deficit touched 96.1 per cent of the budget estimate for the full fiscal. 

The data revealed that total expenditure during the April-September period was Rs 11.49 lakh crore, or at 53.5 per cent of the entire fiscal`s estimate. 

The revenue deficit during the period under review was over Rs 3.8 lakh crore, or 91.9 per cent, of the estimates.

The government has a target of keeping the fiscal deficit for the current year at 3.2 per cent of the GDP.