Parliament passed on July 25 amendments to the 2012 state budget with most of the changes related to allocation of funds for immediate and long-term disaster relief efforts following strong wind, hail and flooding in Kakheti and in some other provinces of the country last week.

• Budgetary Amendments

For the immediate efforts, such as repairing damaged houses, providing food items to disaster-hit households and distributing monetary compensations for damaged crops, the government is setting up a GEL 50 million fund and for long-term regional development projects in Kakheti the government said it was planning to allocate about GEL 110 million.

In other changes in the 2012 state budget, not related to relief efforts, the government intends to allocate total of GEL 6 million for registration of unemployed citizens and for newly announced program on needs assessment survey for internally displaced families.

According to the budgetary amendments, total budget expenditures have been revised upwards from GEL 6.777 billion to GEL 6.783 billion, while the targeted budgetary revenues remained unchanged at GEL 7,053 billion.