Central Public Works Department goes digital

NEW DELHI: Central Public Works Department, (CPWD), the government’s construction arm, has gone digital. Networking all 400 field offices across the country, CPWD would enable payments worth Rs 20,000 crore annually electronically.

A special integrated portal has been created to link all field offices and to ensure digital payments from this month. With this, CPWD has become the first organization of a civil ministry to go digital at the field level. CPWD executes over 25,000 project works across the country involving annual payments of over Rs 20,000 crore every year by its field offices. The new digital payment mode covers over six lakh transactions. The Office of Chief Controller of Accounts (CCA) of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs has evolved this special Public Financial Management ( PFMS) Portal for CPWD.

In yet another initiative, electronic Measurement Book (e-MB) has also been developed for CPWD that enables reporting of progress of works online as per the schedule of agreement with contractors based on which payments will be made. e-MB has been made mandatory from the first of next month doing away with manual reporting by all the 400 field offices.

PFMS is an end-to-end solution for electronic processing payments, tracking fund flow, monitoring, accounting, reconciliation and reporting, etc.