MUMBAI, April 4 -- The state owes around 300,000 contractors working on government projects Rs.96,000 crore in outstanding dues. Now contractors have threatened to stop work if the authorities fail to start clearing pending bills. Dues have been mounting because the government has held back payments amid a cash crunch due to its expenditure on populist schemes and shortfall in revenue collection. Following protests by contractors over pending bills last year, the government cleared dues amounting to Rs.20,000 crore. With no further payments, the outstanding sum has only climbed. With the financial year ending on March 31, and no arrears being cleared, the Maharashtra State Contractors' Association, the state-level body of contractors involved in development work assigned by government departments, wrote to the state government on Friday. The letter pointed to the outstanding sum of Rs.96,000 crore. "In the last over one and a half years, the pending bill amount went up to Rs.1.16 lakh crore and now it is around Rs.96,400 crore which means state government only paid around Rs.20,000 crore. We hoped there would significant payment towards pending bills in March but that didn't happen," states the letter. Some of the departments topping the list are the Jal Jeevan Mission and Maharashtra Jeevan Pradhikaran (Rs.35,000 crore); state public works department (Rs.29,000 crore); rural development and water conservation departments (Rs.6,500 crore); projects under district development plans (Rs.11,000 crore); water resources department (Rs.9,000 crore); Maharashtra Tourism Development Corporation (Rs.3,800 crore); and urban development department special fund works (Rs.2,100 crore). Besides, bills for work executed by local bodies and civic bodies are also pending, impacting small contractors. Milind Bhosale, president of the Maharashtra State Contractors' Association, said on Friday that if there is no move to start clearing bills, contractors would stop work from April 7. "Around one and a half years ago, total arrears were around Rs.89,000 crore. Several government departments paid a total of Rs.20,000 crore towards arrears. But new bills have been generated for work started or completed during this period, so the outstandings have gone up. This is affecting around 3 lakh contractors," said Bhosale. Phone calls and text messages to minister of state for finance, Ashish Jaiswal, went unanswered....