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| Poor spending of PMRP funds: | | Was it due to Azad’s mistrust? | | Early Times Report
Jammu, Sept 5: Towards the end of recently concluded assembly session when Chief Minister Omar Abdullah and his party as well as Cabinet colleague Abdul Rahim Rather made a startling revelation that Rs 24,000 Crore of Prime Minister’s Rs 30,000 Crore Reconstruction Plan were still unspent, there was a point both missed to make and the members in the House failed to take note of.
The Prime Minister’s Reconstruction Plan was unveiled in November 2004 –towards the fag end of Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s government in which Congress was a partner in the ruling coalition. That for immediate two and half years before Omar’s government took over it was the Congress in full control of things under the stewardship of Ghulam Nabi Azad.
The Chief Minister and the Finance Minister appear to have shown cautious amount of courtesy to the Congress, the partner in their government, while blaming the previous regime of failure in making good of an ambitious scheme. The Congress, which made development its key slogan in its previous ruling partnership, maintains an enigmatic silence. Though in private its legislators criticize their former leader.
The Assembly was told that over Rs.30,000 Crore under Prime Minister's Reconstruction Plan, the state could spend about Rs.6,000 crores. The humiliated lot of Congress legislators, many of them Ministers in the previous government, not talk about a an alleged stiff-necked attitude of the then Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad. One legislator said that Azad used to see each step taken by the senior Government functionaries on execution of some projects with suspicion. He said Azad would believe that every Government agency was a burglar hence he had started examining each project personally which consumed lot of his time thereby delaying implementation of the projects.
A senior Government functionary stated that Azad's emphasis on completing ongoing projects in double and even triple shifts proved hollow as major portion of the funds earmarked for various projects could not be fully utilised. He said as a result of poor utilisation of funds the Chief Minister, Omar Abdullah, had to seek concession from the centre so that the Prime Minister's Reconstruction plan was extended beyond March 2009. Omar Abdullah has been assured that the plan would be extended and had been suggested to take in hand measures which could ensure maximum utilisation of the funds earmarked under the Prime Minister's Reconstruction programme.
Vice chairman Panthers Party, Harsh Dev Singh, said that Azad had failed to ensure maximum utilisation of PMRP funds. He said Azad, as Chief Minister, indulged in sloganeering and in making t all claims. He said he himself had stated that only Rs.100 crores had been spent in 18 months. Harsh said had the then chief Minister examined the reasons for it he would have t aken corrective measures but instead of doing it he simply kept raising a bogey of development activities.
He said that the main cause for the poor utilisation of funds under the PMRP was the result of Azad's lack of trust and confidence in the state bureaucracy. He even did not attach importance to his ministerial colleagues with the result a number of them had to seek clearance for even petty affairs. He said that if the three-year tenure of Azad was taken into account it was wrong to say that Rs.6,000 crores out of over Rs.30,000 crores had been utilised adding that during Azad's period the total utilisation of funds under the PMRP did not exceed Rs.4,000 crores. Rs.2000 crores were spend prior to Azad's taking over as chief Minister and during a couple of months after he resigned.
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