With Rs 2 crore, you can still do plenty. Perhaps purchase 500 computers for municipal schools or 40 ambulances for government hospitals. Or, you could go the Finance Commission of India way: splurge on office renovation and feel good, look good while you work. This may be a little tough to digest but the Commission, whose job is to lecture states on tightening purse strings, has spent over Rs 2 crore on renovation of its offices, located on two floors in the STC building on New Delhi’s Tolstoy Marg. The Commission pays Rs 22.4 lakh to the STC by way of rent every month. Although the Commission was constituted on November 1 last year, work’s still underway on the 16,000 sq ft area on floors 16 and 19 of the building. What you have there’s dazzling: cedar-finished looks on wooden walls, partitions and tables, the floors shining with granite tiles. Those in the know say these offices, which earlier housed the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), were adequately furnished before the Commission decided to move in. But all of it was dismantled to make way for a new arrangement. And that too only for 18 months because the term of the Commission runs out in July 2004. The Commission, which has to be constituted at least once in five years, is not a permanent body. The same drill may be repeated for the next lot which comes. ‘‘Who cares? After all, it’s government money,’’ shrugs an insider. Besides Chairman C Rangarajan, the Commission has three members, a Secretary and a small secretariat. To be fair to them, the decision to renovate the offices had little to do with the chairman or the staff of the Commission. It was taken by the Department of Economic Affairs even before the Commission was constituted. G C Srivastava, Secretary of the Commission, is at pains to explain that the Finance Ministry had negotiated with the STC for renting the space to the Finance Commission and ‘‘entered into an agreement with the NBCC to get the office ready.’’ As for the sum to be spent on the renovation, Srivastava said he did not remember it off-hand but what he could say with certainty was that ‘‘we have not made the full payment yet and we have no intention of exceeding the awarded value.’’ The office is not yet fully ready though its term has only 14 months left. Chairman Rangarajan refuted the charge that the previously furnished office was good enough. ‘‘It was not in a good shape for us to occupy,’’ he said, adding that renovation had started when he came. ‘‘The whole point is to have offices which fit in with our requirements.’’ The Finance Commission’s decision to renovate has raised eyebrows because it knows all too well that the finances of the state governments are in deep crisis. Even relatively well-to-do states like Maharashtra and Andhra are facing problems in their budgetary positions. It was only last week that the Commission held its golden jubilee celebrations. Speaking of the country’s mounting debt at the occasion, President A P J Abdul Kalam emphasised the need for all-round austerity. The Commission whose job is to look at the needs of the states, the resources available to them and how the gap can be filled, has repeatedly called on the states to reduce expenditure. Srivastava denies that the Commission has done anything that is wasteful. ‘‘In fact, we returned the budgetary allocations made to the Commission for the last financial year. We insisted that either they be used wisely or returned.’’
