Centre's fiscal deficit touches 45.6% of Budget target till October

The Centre’s fiscal deficit touched 45.6 per cent of the Budget target in the first seven months of the current financial year, higher than 36.3 per cent in the corresponding period of the last year.

With the GDP numbers out, the deficit stood at 4.7 per cent of GDP in the first six months of FY23.

Experts are certain that the deficit — a gap between the government’s expenditure and revenues — will overshoot in the current financial year by up to Rs 1 trillion. However, according to per cent of GDP, it may not surpass the Budget Estimates of