PANAJI
Chief Minister Pramod Sawant returned back to Goa from Rajasthan after finishing his official engagements there including a meeting with Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman to discuss the State's fiscal expectations from the Union budget exercise.
Sawant also attended a scheduled Goods and Services Tax (GST) Council meeting in Jaisalmer but skipped a stopover in the national capital which he was expected to make amid the political buzz around a likely cabinet reshuffle.
Sawant meanwhile presented to Sitharaman and her North Block team a memorandum listing Goa's fiscal expectations from the Union budget aggregating nearly Rs 10,000 crore, including Rs 5,000 crore for upgrading the Konkan Railway segment in the State.
Other projects for which Sawant sought large allocations from the Centre for the State in the budget include revival of khazan land farming (Rs 500 crore), water pipeline laying to replace aging ones (Rs 1,000 crore) and another Rs 1,000 crore for ecological intervention in the State's section of the Western Ghats.
In the memo, Sawant also said that State specific grants recommended by the 15th finance commission, including Rs 200 crore for tourism and Rs 500 crore for Climate Change related projects, may be released in the 2025-26 financial year.
Meanwhile, Pernem MLA Pravin Arlekar late on Saturday said he is in Delhi on party instructions to meet senior leaders there. Arlekar said he is likely to meet several central leaders of the BJP on Saturday night.
It comes on the back of three other legislators having left Goa on Friday alongwith Sawant a day after Health Minister Vishwajit Rane's much publicised visit to Delhi during which he had a tete-a-tete with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
These frequent visits of top politicians to the national capital in the recent days have caused a buzz in political circles mostly centred around an expected cabinet reshuffle which Sawant himself has said will happen in a recent interview.
