THE Ministry of Finance has been working to create two permanent structures to monitor development programmes in a bid to speed up spending on them. As per the plan, one structure will be coordinated by the monitoring and evaluation division chief and represented by the heads of the budget, revenue, international cooperation and policy analysis divisions. These divisions are headed by joint secretaries at the ministry. This team will collect data on the progress of the projects, analyze them, and interact with the concerned ministry officials and project chiefs to find out their problems. "A report will then be sent to the finance secretary and the minister," said Ram Sharan Pudasaini, spokesperson at the Finance Ministry. The second structure will be under the chief of the monitoring and evaluation division at the ministry and represented by under secretaries from the budget and foreign aid divisions and the Financial Comptroller General's Office (FCGO). "This team will gather information from the ministries regularly and also visit the project sites if necessary," said Pudasaini, who also heads the monitoring and evaluation division at the ministry. He added that the plan had been initiated as monitoring on an ad hoc basis as was being done in the past was ineffective. "We want to create a permanent structure which is expected to be more effective in identifying and solving problems and help speed up capital expenditure," he said. Meanwhile, the ministry has also been developing software that will allow information on the progress of any project to be accessed online. "We will not be able to get information directly from each project but from the related ministry online," said Pudasaini. The Finance Ministry has been holding bimonthly review meetings of projects listed in the budget under the chairmanship of the minister. It also conducts regular monitoring of projects having a budget of more than Rs 150 million.
No comments:
Post a Comment