Plan schemes this financial year are set to start rolling along the implementation stage, a lot earlier than usual, Minister for Planning K.C. Joseph has said.
After a meeting of the State Planning Board here on Thursday, he told the media that a sum of Rs.1,150 crore, constituting 8.85 per cent of an outlay of Rs.13,000 crore under this year’s State Plan, had already been utilised till July 23.
Usually, a very large chunk of the spending under the Plan schemes would happen only in the fourth quarter of the financial year.
He said steps had been taken for the issuance of administrative sanction for all new and also continuing schemes before August. Plan implementation would improve further in the second quarter, he said.
The efforts to spread out Plan execution evenly across the year had been going on in the State for the last many years and now it was beginning to succeed, the Minister said.
Monitoring system
The outlay under the schemes of the local self-government institutions (LSGIs) this financial year comes to Rs.4,000 crore, he said. The LSGIs have proposed a total of 2,05,529 projects this year and, of them, 1,98,110 projects have already received approval for implementation. Therefore, their Plan achievement too will be high this time, the Minister said.
The Planning Board, with the help of the Indian Institute of Information Technology-Kerala at the Technopark, has developed a web-based Plan monitoring system, ‘PLANSPACE,’ for the concurrent monitoring of Plan schemes online, vice chairman of the Planning Board K.M. Chandrasekhar said.
This system would be soon integrated with the Treasury Information System to enable real-time monitoring of the expenditure under each scheme.
Mr. Joseph said the B.K. Chaturvedi Committee Report for Restructuring Centrally Sponsored Schemes had proposals that would give some leeway for Kerala to implement the Central schemes according to conditions specific to the State.
Various State government departments involved in the implementation of Central schemes were examining these proposals minutely.
The Chief Secretary had been asked to vet the suggestions from the department heads for submission to the Union government.
Annual awards
He also announced a system of annual awards for the government departments for their performance in Plan implementation.
The awards will be given under five categories to recognise the initiatives taken by the departments for timely completion of Plan schemes.
