PIONEER EDGE NEWS SERVICE | Dehradun
Chief secretary Anand Bardhan has directed the departments to ensure that 50 per cent of the budget under the capital head should be spent till the end of September month.
He gave the order while reviewing the capital expenditure, centrally funded schemes, externally funded projects and the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Key Outcome Indicators (KOIs) of National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) at the State secretariat on Thursday.
The CS directed the departments to expedite capital expenditure. A total of 12 departments were included in the meeting. The CS was informed that a provision of Rs 14,763 crore was made in the budget this year out of which Rs 2,215 crore (15 per cent) has been released and only 1049 crore (7.11 per cent) has been spent so far.
The CS said that priority should be given to the announcements of the chief minister while incurring capital expenditure. He also directed the departments to focus on KPI and KOI. Explaining the KOI, the CS said that for example in the tourism department, the outcome is the increase in number of tourists or percent increase in the average stay of tourists as compared to the expenditure made by the department.
Directing the Horticulture department to increase its capacity, the CS said that focus should be on cold chain and increasing off season production. He said that work on the polyhouse project should be expedited. The CS said that priority should be given to value added and food processing projects.
The CS asked the Agriculture department to prepare guidelines for bio fencing and chain link fencing and said that a separate head should be opened in the account books for them. He said that a sum of Rs 200 crore should be made under this head and ordered that this provision should be made in the supplementary budget of this year. The CS said that the proposals of bio- fencing and chain-link fencing should be given priority in the areas where agricultural crops are damaged due to human-wildlife conflict.
The CS also directed the Dairy Development department to augment the dairy products of Anchal Dairy. He said that maintenance and repair works of sugar mills should be completed soon and production from these mills should commence.
Principal secretary RK Sudhanshu, secretaries Radhika Jha, Dilip Jawalkar, BVRC Purushottam, V Shanmugam, Dhiraaj Garbyal, Sridhar Babu Adhyanki, additional secretary Himanshu Khurana and others attended the meeting.
