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Santanu Saikia
New Delhi, Nov 19: The finance ministry has decided to cut the fat in social sector spending, worth around Rs 18,000 crore annually, by bringing all such expenditure under a new scrutiny regime.
In a revolutionary attempt aimed at curbing expenditure, the finance ministry has ordered the appraisal of all social sector plan projects by independent non-government bodies.
Till date, social sector spending had been considered the "holy cow" by North Block mandarins and attempts were rarely made to look closely into their operations. But the new appraisal format is expected to bring in accountability and responsibility.
No hard estimates have yet been made by the finance ministry of the extent of savings, but projections are that there will be a dramatic rise in efficiency of these schemes resulting out of the new scrutiny regime. Tailored by the bureaucracy, such schemes are alleged to have a lot of built-in redundancy. Lacking in transparency, they allow for huge leakages.
Speaking to The FinancialExpress, expenditure secretary EAS Sharma said that the new appraisals would be conducted through an approved procedure. "The idea is to do an impact study and analyse the efficiency of the money spent, optimise output and prevent leakages," he stressed.
In order to ensure that the new directive does not hold up projects, the North Block has decided that a time-bound action plan is to be undertaken by the administrative ministries handling these projects. The idea is to ensure that projects are not suddenly starved of money. The appraisals will have to come over a period of time and the ministries have to take definitive steps towards this goal, in the same format as "time slice" loans given by multilateral financing agencies.
Under the central plan outlay, agriculture is allocated Rs 3,078 crore, rural development Rs 7,688 crore and social services Rs 13,854 crore. Not all of this allocation is strictly in the social sector and provisions for Indira Awas Yojana and National Social Assistance Programmemade under the social services sector, are included in the rural development sector. The total social sector outlay will amount to around Rs 18,000 crore.
According to Sharma, the ministry is also working at "convergence of schemes" in order to rule out duplication. "There can be projects in the department of education and in the department of women and child welfare which have the same objectives but are differently administered. We plan to bring them together to give them better focus. Similarly, catchment area treatment, wasteland development and some schemes in the ministry of agriculture can be combined to achieve common goals," the expenditure secretary said.
Sharma claimed that the objective would be a reduction in "unit cost", greater impact at the ground level and better focus.
The convergence concept is being adopted through the Expenditure Finance Committee of which Sharma is the chairman. The Planning Commission is fully involved in identifying these common schemes.
Copyright © 1998Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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