Goa govt’s ‘earnings’ fall after decimal error

Panaji: Someone at the helm of number-crunching for the annual Economic Survey decided to play decimal roulette, particularly with the earnings attributed to govt. The result? Govt’s revenue quietly underwent a weight loss diet — all thanks to a misplaced dot in the Economic Survey report.
State govt’s total revenue figures for the last two financial years were reduced by Rs 11,937 crore in 2023-24 and by Rs 9,107 crore in 2024-25. The error raises questions about what else might be wrong in the Economic Survey report that was tabled in the state legislative assembly.
According to the revised and supposedly “corrected” figures, Goa raked in Rs 11,351.35 crore from eight major departments across the financial year 2023-24. For 2024-25, up to Dec, the collections stand at Rs 9,266.07 crore.
But rewind to the earlier version of the same report that the CM presented on the day of the state budget, and the numbers had ballooned to far more ambitious proportions — Rs 23,288.49 crore for 2023-24 and a staggering Rs 18,373 crore for 2024-25.
Clearly, someone added a little too much optimism… or a zero or two.
While the decimal point may be tiny in size, its impact on the state’s financial portrait has been anything but. With one innocent slip of the finger, the town and country planning department was briefly promoted to Goa’s top breadwinner, before being unceremoniously demoted by a more diligent editor — or a calculator.
With the so-called decimal error being corrected, the TCP’s revenue for 2023-24 was corrected from an atrocious Rs 13,439 crore to a more modest Rs 134.4 crore. For the 2024-25 financial year, TCP’s corrected revenue stands at Rs 110.9 crore and not the eye-bulging Rs 11,092 crore that someone decided to casually paste in the economic survey table.
“This is interestingly funny and serious also,” said Swapnesh Sherlekar, who put out a video last week stating that if the TCP was raking in Rs 11,092 crore to 13,439 crore a year, it not only amounted to 50% of the state’s revenue but also meant that rampant land conversion was taking place.
Sherlekar was not the only one with eagle eyes. AAP MLA Venzy Viegas also noted figure anomalies in the Economic Survey 2023-24, after which he threatened to issue a breach of privilege notice to the Goa legislative assembly for the snafu. It was this that prompted a revised version to be quietly uploaded on the assembly website.
No word yet on who exactly was behind the numerical blooper, but it’s safe to say that a lot of red faces are under silent but intense scrutiny.