Lesser funds spent on six urban schemes

NEW DELHI: While the housing and urban affairs ministry has taken credit for allocating over Rs 1.31 lakh crore for six flagship projects to transform urban areas including smart cities, AMRUT, Swachh Bharat and PM Awas Yojna, just Rs 13,000 crore has been spent by state agencies.

TOI has learnt that against the allocation of Rs 1.31 lakh crore since the NDA government launched these schemes, the housing and urban affairs ministry has released only Rs 38,890 crore to local authorities.

This could be one of the reasons why people living in cities and towns are not seeing visible change in their surroundings. This has also exposed how municipal bodies and local governments have little capacity to spend and undertake development work, which has a direct impact on the success of flagship schemes.


Sources said the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) raised concern over this trend of central funds being “parked” when it held a review meeting last week on the utilisation of funds.

In percentage terms, the utilisation is the lowest in the Smart City Mission, primarily because city administrations have taken time to set up dedicated entities to carry out the task of preparing projects and bidding them out.

The other big chunk of allocation has been for the AMRUT scheme, which aims to provide water supply connections, lay sewer lines and drainage system in 500 cities and towns. The ministry had adopted approving annual plan of states claiming this would give greater liberty to state governments to implement the scheme. This was also projected as the Centre freeing its control over sanctioning each project, which was followed under JNNURM during UPA rule.

Recently, housing and urban affairs minister Hardeep Singh Puri had said till January-end, 308 projects worth Rs 186 crore were completed and contracts for 1,632 projects worth Rs 34,187 crore were awarded. Another 784 projects worth Rs 12,903 crore are at the tendering stage.
In case of PM Awas Yojna, states have spent about 4,803 crore against the sanctioned Rs 13,328 crore.