Cabinet decides to expand financial assistance scheme for students, raise more revenue through excise

Puducherry Cabinet expands financial assistance scheme, merges housing schemes, and plans to increase revenue from excise for welfare programs.

Besides giving in-principle approval for raising own resources through proceeds from excise, the Puducherry Cabinet has decided to expand the Perunthalaivar Kamarajar Financial Assistance Scheme (PKFAS), enhance assistance for construction of houses for the underprivileged by merging housing schemes of the Centre and the Puducherry administration and takeover the Co-operative school in Lingareddipalayam.

The Cabinet, which met on Friday evening, discussed enhancement of licence fee for all categories of liquor outlets, issue fresh permits for opening retail outlets and for setting up new liquor bottling units. The government wanted to increase the revenue from excise considering the momentum in tourist arrival and volume it could generate. The government was of the considered view that there was scope to raise at least ₹500 crore more from excise which would help in implementing welfare schemes and execute development programmes without exerting any burden on the general public, said a government source.

Other than issuing permits under the tourism category, no fresh licence had been given in the last several years for opening retail outlets, the source said adding that the Chief Minister during the Cabinet meeting gave necessary directions to the Excise department to work out the modalities to enhance revenue from the sector. 

Scaling up financial aid

The Cabinet has given its nod to extend the PKFAS scheme to students admitted in dental and veterinary courses, and in Agriculture, Law, Arts and Science colleges in Puducherry. Hitherto, the government was only providing reimbursement of fee to students admitted by the Centralised Admission Committee in MBBS, nursing and engineering courses.

“We want to expand the scheme to offer financial assistance in a uniform manner to students across all disciplines in the higher education sector. The current financial outgo for the government for reimbursing the fee for students admitted through Centac is ₹26 crore and the expenditure would go up with more students being brought under the purview of the financial assistance scheme,” an official said. 

The other decision of the Cabinet was to merge the existing housing scheme offered by the Puducherry government with the Centre’s housing scheme and provide a sum of ₹5 lakh to beneficiaries from the underprivileged sections of the society to construct dwelling units in the Union Territory. The meeting also decided to review the guideline register (GLR) value. The GLR was raised by 5% in 2013-14 and subsequently reduced by 25% in the year 2016-17. The government was planning to bring the GLR value back to 2013-14 level, the source said.