CHENNAI: Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami wrote a detailed letter on April 5 to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and Chairman of the 15th Finance Commission, explaining that certain terms of reference of the commission would affect the devolution of central tax revenues etc.Just as the meeting of the Finance Ministers of the southern States was going on at Thiruvananthapuram, the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister was chairing a high-level meeting at the secretariat on the impact of certain criteria fixed for the 15th Finance Commission. The State has skipped this meeting without assigning any reason.
The CM discussed the financial loss and other impact of the commission on Tamil Nadu with Deputy Chief Minister O Panneerselvam who is holding the Finance portfolio and five other senior ministers. The meeting decided to represent the financial loss and the impact of using 2011 census to calculate the population of States, to the Centre and the commission again.
“The meeting has also decided to request MPs from Tamil Nadu to meet the Chairman of the 15th Finance Commission. If required, MPs belonging to all southern States will be requested to join the Tamil Nadu MPs’ delegation as South India as a whole will be a loser under the scheme of things of the 15th Finance Commission,” the sources added.
“The exact financial loss due to the 15th Finance Commission cannot be quantified now because we don’t know what are the parameters and the weightage on different factors that the commission is going to adopt. The State government has been opposing the population criteria adopted by this commission right from the beginning. The CM has dealt with this subject in his letter to the Prime Minister, Union Finance Minister and chairman of the commission,” the sources pointed out.