Impact of COVID-19 on Budget Implementation at Gaindakot Municipality, Nepal

After the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic from china in 17th November 2019, whole world is affected and most countries adopted complete lockdown for its prevention. Nepal government also announced complete lockdown from 24th March 2020 up to 14th June 2020 with partial lockdown extending up to 21st July 2020. This study was carried out to explore the effect of lockdown on capital budget expenditure in Gaindakot Municipality, a central municipal of country. Data were collected from Gaidakot Municipality and trends were analyzed to assess the financial expenditure of Budget. Only 42.98 million rupees was expended during lockdown period for the capital works, which is 41.57% less than the expenditure of 73.57 million on previous fiscal year for same period. Out of 3.17 million budget allocated for forest and environment protection, none of the programs were executed and no budget was expended. Similar case was seen for agricultural and animal programs too. Similarly only 50000 was expended in water supply scheme out of 1.74 million budget. River training and irrigation works was carried out expending only 7.33 million out of yearly budget of 34.3 million. The result of study showed that there is great disturbance in development activities due to coronavirus pandemic and expenditure on capitalized budget for different sectors was decreased. We can expect the impact on whole country to be worse looking on scenario of single municipality thus promoting economic activities with adapting control mechanism for corona virus