Abhijit Sen pulls up Punjab govt

States need to spruce up their official machinery to utilise funds drawn by the central government. This message was conveyed to the Punjab bureaucracy by Planning Commission member Abhijit Sen in Chandigarh today.

He told the participants at a training programme on ‘Programme evaluation and performance review for senior Punjab government officers’ that they should hire the services of external agencies to seek better management technology to give result-oriented performance.

He said the Planning Commission was contemplating creating an evaluation fund to help states in self assessment.

Sen stressed the need for sincere efforts on the part of state governments, which, according to him, were more inclined to draw funds rather than making optimum utilisation of the existing funds released to them.

At the same time, he said the Centre should help the state in building evaluation capacities to achieve the targets.