The Centre has initiated efforts to establish a unified agency responsible for infrastructure planning, monitoring, and their evaluation.
The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) is actively working on this initiative to ensure that infrastructure projects deliver the maximum impact on the economy, job creation, quality of life, and overall living conditions, writes Times of India.
The Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) under the Ministry of Commerce has been tasked with creating an initial framework for this purpose.
“Since resources are limited, it’s important to have integrated planning, and monitoring of all projects by one agency. But the evaluation of projects is more important to find what were the results and impact of the huge public expenditure. We need to evaluate them both in terms of short-term and medium-term impacts,” said ToI report, quoting a source.
In the last few years, the increase in public capital expenditure has been the major theme.
In the fiscal year 2023-24, the budget has raised the capital investment outlay by 33 per cent, totaling Rs 10 lakh crore, equivalent to 3.3 per cent of the GDP.
This marks a significant increase from the Rs 7.28 lakh crore allocated in the previous fiscal year (2022-23) and the modest Rs 2.6 lakh crore allocated in 2017-18.
Officials suggest that the trend of allocating substantial funds for capital expenditure is expected to continue, with a notable increase in fund utilisation.
Notably, the Union Finance Ministry recently recommended that the railways, road transport, and shipping ministries conduct productivity assessments of their completed projects. Similar evaluations are to be carried out for Metro Rail projects.
Furthermore, the Finance Ministry also asked NITI Aayog to continually monitor the data generated from these evaluations and collaborate with the respective ministries to propose necessary measures.