Orissa to go for real time monitoring of expenditure

At a time when the timely expenditure of funds allocated under various sectors in the state budget continues to be a cause of concern, the Orissa government has decided to put in place a mechanism for real time monitoring of expenditure vis-a-vis budgetary allotment.

This decision was taken at a high-level meeting of all the state secretaries chaired by the Chief Secretary. The decision assumes significance as the state prepares to present the budget for 2010-11 in the Assembly session beginning June 22.

In order to ensure the real time monitoring of expenditure, all the treasuries and sub-treasuries will be computerized and the expenditure of all departments will be made online by October this year.

A major chunk of the expenditure in the state happens only in the last quarter (January-March) of any fiscal and the real time monitoring mechanism will ensure that the expenditure is evenly distributed throughout the year.

The meeting also emphasized on the computerization of human resource management. This includes having online records of the services rules of the 3.3 lakh odd employees of the state government.

This initiative has already started and is under different stages of implementation in departments like health, home, mass education and rural development.

A decision has also been taken to streamline and strengthen the 3000 odd common services centres (CSCs) in the state.

The focus is on making the CSCs more popular and customer friendly and also to ensure the proper connectivity of these centres with the different government departments.

It has been targeted to set up over 8,000 CSCs across the state.