PC's expenditure reform hits plan panel roadblock

An audacious attempt by finance minister P Chidambaram to handover the implementation of all central schemes with annual allocations of less than Rs 300 crore to state governments has come a cropper. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Mar 11, 2013, 01:07:50 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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An audacious attempt by finance minister P Chidambaram to handover the implementation of all central schemes with annual allocations of less than Rs 300 crore to state governments has come a cropper.

Individual ministries that centrally-run these schemes have put up strong resistance to this proposal. "The proposal has been termed as non-implementable by the central ministries because of the complexities involved," planning commission deputy chairperson Montek Singh Ahluwalia told HT.

However, the total number of central schemes will come down to 70 from 147 from 2013-14 if the panel's proposal is accepted by the Cabinet. This will be achieved by merging similar schemes and having one big scheme for a sector.

The idea was to have lesser number of schemes with national objectives rather than spending the government money through wide spectrum resulting in diffused outcomes.

While the Cabinet note circulated by the Planning Commission terms infeasibility as reason behind its rejection, the panel officials said the bureaucracy feared that Chidambaram's plan would result in pruning of senior positions in different ministries.

There is at least one officer in-charge of a scheme in each ministry and these positions would have been lost if these schemes were transferred to the state governments, officials said.

The note says that most of the existing schemes would be retained in same or a modified form in a bid to overcome bureaucratic resistance. The note, if approved by the Cabinet, would be implemented for disbursement of around Rs 3,00,000 crore from the next financial year.

The note, however, appeases Chidambaram a bit as the panel has agreed to reduce the number of total central schemes from 147 to around 70 sector specific schemes.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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