Home Ministry to step up vigil on use of State Disaster Relief Fund

NEW DELHI: The home ministry has decided to sharpen vigil to ensure proper use of the State Disaster Relief Fund (SDRF). This comes after the Comptroller General of Accounts and parliamentary committees raised a red flag on the huge expenditure under the SDRF.

In a letter sent last month, the ministry told the states to submit monthly reports by the 10th of every month instead of quarterly returns and update an online portal started by the ministry regarding the utilisation of the SDRF. The ministry said in the letter that the response of the state governments with regard to timely submission of even the quarterly return had "not been satisfactory". It said that the June instalment of the fund will not be released till the states submit the utilisation certificate for SDRF as on April 1.

The allocation under SDRF for 2014-15 was Rs 7,387 crore. The Centre has SDRF for each state with an allocated fund for providing immediate relief to the people affected by notified disasters and additional financial assistance is provided to the states from National Disaster Response Fund, provided the state in question does not have adequate financial resources to meet the disaster.

"Parliamentary committees viz, Public Accounts Committee, Estimate Committee and Comptroller General of Accounts (CGA) have expressed concern about the monitoring of funds incurred from SDRF and National Disaster Relief Fund. These committees have stressed need for some mechanism to ensure the expenditure from these funds is incurred for the purpose it was meant," the letter said.

Ahead of a meeting that the ministry has called on June 23, it asked the states to apprise it of the status of setting up State Disaster Response Force and get their annual reports prepared under Section 70(2) of the Disaster Management (DM) Act. It also asked the states to notify rules under Section 78 of the DM Act.