The cash-strapped Maharashtra government has put a freeze on recruitment, barring some departments/ corporations that have their own money to sustain growing impact. We saw it coming when a white paper on the state’s financial condition was placed in the state legislature’s budget session in April this year. Expenditure on salary and pension of government employees constitute the largest chunk of the state’s outgoings. The white paper said, “We need to establish a revenue balance and the best way to do it is to control salary and pension expenditure.”

The decision was hard to make because of its political ramifications, say the BJP government mandarins, but they insist that it was needed to bring in fiscal prudence to the state budgeting, which has been losing credibility because of mismatched projections and actual expenditure. The state has been witnessing a huge gap of 14-21 per cent between the presented budget and the actual expenses.