Thiruvananthapuram: In terms of
plan expenditure in 2017-18, it was a bad year for Thiruvananthapuram corporation as it recorded a figure of only 65.95%, the lowest among civic bodies in the state.
Though officials claimed that there were bills to be cleared which would increase the
expenditure to 73%, it will not elevate the standings of the corporation as all other civic bodies have crossed the 75% mark, with Kollam recording a whopping 104.25%.
Right from the beginning, corporation found itself on backfoot with the new system for plan implementation. Even in October, the plan expenditure of the corporation had barely touched 10%. The focus on getting technical sanction pushed corporation to the bottom of the list and later the civic body could never make up for the lost time as contractors refused to take up works owing to GST hurdle and bills kept piling up in the treasury.
Although mayor V K Prasanth was able to reach a consensus with contractors over GST and works were tendered, the task was way too high and corporation could never recover from the two-month standstill in execution of works.
The civic body’s plan outlay for this fiscal envisaged 2,079 projects at Rs 458 crore. According to officials, implementation of 926 works would have made up for 75% plan implementation, but with works failing to get tendered on time, these hopes were dashed.
In August itself, the corporation was pushed to the bottom, earning the tag of tail-ender along with Thrissur and Kannur corporations. The civic body’s expenditure percentage was 2.82% at the beginning of August, while Kollam corporation had already attained 25.63%.
The civic body had however set exemplary models aimed at higher percentage in plan expenditure. It was the first civic body in the state to introduce slabwise distribution of projects based on budgets for technical sanction which enabled all officials, starting from assistant executive engineer to chief engineer, to award technical sanction to works. This had saved lot of time in clearing projects since it eased the burden on a single official to clear all projects.
Chairman of development standing committee Vanchiyoor P Babu said that the corporation will recover from this setback. “We have already got our plan document cleared and would be able to start execution in the middle of April. We could never actually gain momentum after the time we had lost due to GST and other issues in implementation of works,” he said.
