Mumbai, June 30: Maharashtra Finance Minister and Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar on Monday presented supplementary demands worth Rs 57,509.71 crore for the financial year 2025-26 on the first day of the Monsoon Session of the Legislature.

This comes amid reported constraints over the availability of adequate funds due to the ballooning fiscal and revenue deficits and mounting public debt.

Of the Rs 57,509.71 crore, the allocation of Rs 19,183.85 crore has been made for committed expenditure and the balance is to provide funds for various government programmes and also towards the state government’s contribution in the implementation of Central government schemes.

DyCM Pawar, during the budget session held in March this year, had tabled the supplementary demands worth Rs 6,480.20 crore.

A whopping Rs 15,465.13 crore has been allocated to the urban development department headed by Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde ahead of the upcoming elections to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation and other 28 civic bodies to carry out various civic and development works.

Further, Rs 11,042.76 crore has been earmarked for various grants as per the recommendations of the 15th Finance Commission. The government has made an allocation of Rs 9,068.49 crore for the public works department to clear the pending dues of Rs 80,000 crore of various contractors for carrying out road and bridge works.

The government has earmarked Rs 3,228.38 crore for the refund of stamp duty cess being collected for metro projects and also for other development works by the municipal corporations, municipalities, municipal councils and zilla parishads.

The Fadnavis government has allocated: Rs 2,240.82 crore towards state government’s contribution for tunnel construction for metro and other transport infrastructure projects, Rs 2,182.82 crore for share capital to cooperative sugar factories for margin money loan to be drawn from the National Cooperative Development Corporation, Rs 2,150 crore for taking benefit under central government’s 50 year long term loan, Rs 2,096.58 crore to various corporations to complete incomplete and long pending irrigation projects, Rs 2,000 crore district roads and bridges, Rs 4,733.11 crore to rural development department, Rs 3,798.93 crore to social justice department to implement ongoing schemes for backward classes and payment of scholarship to eligible students and Rs 2,835.02 crore for cooperation, marketing and textile department.

The state government has earmarked Rs 1,300 crore for the Department of Other Backward Classes to pay scholarships to eligible students.

For the Department of Women and Child Development, the government has allocated Rs 2,665.76 crore. This is to ensure the timely payment of monthly instalments to the eligible women beneficiaries under the Ladki Bahin Yojana and other schemes.

Further, an allocation of Rs 1,000 crore has been earmarked for carrying out various development works for the Kumbh Mela in Nashik next year.

New Delhi, June 30: India will continue to be the fastest-growing economy at the current rate of growth — or even better — and with the monsoon being good, agriculture will definitely come up with a more positive number, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Monday.

The GDP growth accelerated to a robust 7.4 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2024-25, as result of which the growth rate for the full financial year works out to 6.5 per cent on the back of a strong performance of the agriculture, construction, and services sectors, according to latest RBI data.

In a series of posts on X social media platform, taken out from media interviews, the finance minister said this growth rate will continue, and may even become better with good monsoon around.

She further said that deepening of our markets is actually showing and “the retailers are benefitting, ordinary citizens are benefitting”.

“Our systems are transparent. They are digitised and can be accessed from home. Individuals are able to do it on their own rather than depend on others to help them out. These are signs of a very good dynamic economy,” FM Sitharaman emphasised.

According to her, it is clear from the policy that labour-intensive units will be given support.

“We have been specific that handicrafts, handmade goods etc will get succour. So there is no way in which we are choosing between one (labour) and the other (capital/tech). Manufacturing, whether it is employment-intensive, or requires automation, policy support will be given,” the Finance Minister highlighted.

Budget after budget over the past 11 years, this government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi “has made sure that we make some concrete policies that will help people, particularly the MSMEs,” she added.

Like the way PM Modi pushed the Aspirational Districts to meet saturation in most of the schemes, the Dhan-Dhaanya Krishi Yojana will make agricultural productivity the centre focus, and the value addition as the way in which farmers’ income can be increased even in these areas, she mentioned.

“So these are areas in which, in fact, I did suggest to the banks that in these 100 districts, banks should come up with tailor-made schemes for them,” said FM Sitharaman.

PM Modi has also been very keen that defence will not be left wanting.

“Defence’s requirements will be met. Since 2014, attention has been given to small and greater details of demands from defence, whether it is bulletproof jackets or getting the goods in time to the higher reaches,” she posted.

“Indian defence production itself has seen a different growth and today they are also becoming prominent exporters. Other than exports, the way in which domestic capacities have given us the advantage of buying from India for Indian purposes has actually marked the difference,” FM Sitharaman added.

Kolkata, June 30: As the investigation into the rape of a law student within her college premises at Kasba in South Kolkata, West Bengal, continues, information has surfaced that the said college authorities allegedly ignored criminal antecedents of one of the three prime accused, Monojit Mishra, while giving him contractual employment.

Sources said Mishra originally got admission for the LLB course in the same college in 2012.

In 2013, he was booked in a police case on charges of hooliganism in the Kalighat area in South Kolkata, in which he chopped off the finger of an individual.

Thereafter, his admission at the same college was cancelled, and he remained absconding and away from the state for over three years. He returned to Kolkata after the case against him was settled and got re-admission at the same college in 2017.

Again in March 2018, two female students of the same college accused him of sexual harassment, following which he was partially suspended for some time from attending the college, except for appearing for examinations. However, somehow the matter against him did not proceed for a long time, and he started attending the college regularly.

In March 2023, he was again accused of sexual harassment by a female student of the college. In December 2023, some students filed a complaint at the local police station, accusing Mishra of entering the college with outsider anti-social elements and beating them up.

Now, questions are being raised about how the college authorities gave him a contractual appointment, ignoring his criminal antecedents.

College insiders said that Mishra happened to be an extremely close confidant of the ruling party MLA, who is also in the governing body of the same college, whom the accused used to address as “uncle”.

Questions have started surfacing on why just “initials” of the three persons accused of raping a law college student in Kolkata were mentioned in the FIR instead of full names.

The names of the three accused are Monojit Mishra, Jaib Ahmed, and Pramit Mukhopadhyay, all linked to the Trinamool Congress’ student wing, Trinamool Chhatra Parishad (TMCP).

However, in the FIR registered in the case, the three accused persons were referred to as “M”, “J” and “P”.

While the leaders of the opposition parties claim that this mention of just the initials of the three accused in the FIR was done deliberately by the cops to conceal the fact that the accused persons were linked to TMCP, even legal experts feel that in this case, there was no reason for the police to mention just the initials instead of the names.