Taking a cue from the Prime Minister’s Office, the AAP government has set up a standing project monitoring group to coordinate and monitor major infrastructure projects in the national capital. The monitoring group would be headed by chief secretary and principal secretaries of finance, urban development, power, environment and planning departments would be its members. Representatives of the concerned ministries of the Union government would also be members of the monitoring group.
An order to this effect issued by the finance department said that a standing project monitoring group has been set up to coordinate with financial and physical progress of major infrastructure projects in the national capital. It said that the group would be meeting as and when required and would discuss the progress of major infrastructure projects delayed / held up to resolve issues or bottlenecks for timely completion of the projects. If required, the group can co-opt other members as well.
The AAP government has not taken up any infrastructural capital project in the past one year. “Most of the ongoing capital projects were started by the previous Sheila Dikshit government. Let’s wait and watch how many capital projects would be announced in the upcoming annual budget of the AAP government,” a PWD engineer told this newspaper. “If some infrastructural projects are announced in the upcoming budget, the role of the monitoring group will be very crucial to ensure they are completed in a time-bound manner.” A similar monitoring group was set up to expedite the projects related to the Commonwealth Games in Delhi in 2010.
A bureaucrat said a cell within the Cabinet Secre-tariat, called the Project Monitoring Group, was created to track stalled investment projects, both in the public and private sectors and to remove the implementation bottlenecks in these projects on a fast-track basis.
