130 Govt schemes to be scrapped

A Planning Commission report recommends scrapping of all schemes that have annual outlay of less than Rs 300 crore, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Nov 12, 2006, 19:03:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Eighteen Central government ministries will have no scheme to administer and 12 ministries will have loads of work, if the Planning Commission's report on winding 130 Centrally Sponsored Schemes (CSS) is accepted by the government.

A committee constituted by the Planning Commission has recommended that all schemes having annual outlay of less than Rs 300 crore should be scrapped except those for statistics and data collection.

The basis for the recommendation is that there should be a minimum outlay of Rs 50 lakh for each district to make it effective. India has 600 districts.

The recommendation, the committee observed, will not make a major difference in government's planning for future. The annual expenditure on CSS below Rs 300 crore is just Rs 8,432 crore as compared to Rs 63,563 crores for CSS with budget of over Rs 300 crore.

The 18 ministries or government departments that will be affected are mostly related to social sector like Ministry of Environment and Forest, Social Welfare Ministry, Tribal Affairs Ministry, Department of Animal Husbandary, Labour Ministry, Road Transport and Highways ministry and Urban Development ministry.

Another ramification of the recommendation can be of administrative nature. Work in most of the departments having no scheme to administer will fall drastically.

"The role of such departments will remain of policy formation, monitoring and compliance of international convention," said Arvind Varma, a former IAS officer, in the report.

This apparently can create heartburns among bureaucracy. A labour ministry official pointed out that scrapping of the schemes will create more problems than solutions.

"Most states don't have system to monitor the schemes. Instead, the government should give more powers to the ministries for accountability and proper monitoring," he said.

The report also states that once the schemes are scrapped only 12 ministries will have CCS for operation. Schemes like Sarva Siksha Abhiyan, National Rural Employment Gurantee Scheme, Integrated Child Development Services, Post Matric Scholarship for SC students and Pulse Polio will continue.

The committee has also recommended that the Planning Commission should rate each state into three categories - with per capita income higher than national average, lower than national average and special category states - for differential allocation of funds.

An incentive fund of Rs 5,000 crore should be created for states performing well towards Millennium Development goals.

The report was discussed at the last full Planning Commission meeting but no final decision was taken. Decision is expected in next meeting slated for December.

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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