When did Bihar State introduce the Green Budget for the first time ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, Financial Year 2020-21. Bihar's green budget is a separate document laid before the legislature alongside the annual state budget, which pulls together every scheme across departments that carries an environmental or climate purpose and shows what the state is spending on them as a single number. The series begins with the financial year 2020-21: the earliest green-budget document on the state finance department's own budget portal is the one for 2020-21, there is no earlier one, and the arithmetic of the series confirms it independently — the green budget presented for 2026-27 is described as Bihar's seventh, and counting seven back from 2026-27 lands exactly on 2020-21. The size of that first document is worth carrying with the year, because it is what makes the fact concrete rather than a bare date: roughly Rs 5,693 crore, about 7 per cent of the state's total budget for the year, spread over 96 schemes. The green share then rose to over 9.6 per cent in 2021-22 and peaked at 12.5 per cent in 2023-24 before easing back, while the number of schemes in the document grew to 298 by 2026-27 — more than three times the original 96. So the answer is not merely 'some year around 2020'; it is the first entry in a series whose growth can be traced year by year.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Two years too early. No green-budget document exists for 2018-19 on the state's budget portal, and 2018-19 predates the whole cluster of Bihar's climate initiatives — the Jal-Jeevan-Hariyali mission itself was launched only in 2019.  (c) The most attractive wrong answer, and for a real reason: 2019-20 is the year Odisha brought out a climate budget, and it is also the year Bihar launched Jal-Jeevan-Hariyali, so a candidate who has anchored on 'around 2019' will pick it. Bihar's own green budget document, however, begins with 2020-21.  (d) This is the SECOND green budget, not the first — the year in which the green share of the state budget rose above 9.6 per cent. Candidates who remember a figure from the second year rather than the first are the ones this option is set to catch.

Concept: A green budget does not create new money; it re-reads the existing budget through an environmental lens. Departments tag the schemes whose outlays serve environmental or climate objectives — afforestation, pond and river rejuvenation, solar power, clean transport, waste management, irrigation efficiency — and the finance department consolidates those tagged lines into one statement laid before the House. The technique is the same one used for gender budgeting, where allocations benefiting women are separated out and reported, and both belong to a wider family of 'budget tagging' instruments recommended for tracking cross-cutting priorities that no single department owns. The value is transparency and comparison over time: because the tagged total can be expressed as a share of the whole budget, a legislature can ask whether the environmental share is rising or falling. The limitation is equally real, and Bihar's own record illustrates it — the tagged amount can grow while the physical indicators on the ground move very little, because tagging measures intent and expenditure, not outcome.

State PCS 2024 Q74 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q74 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer