New Delhi: Around 600 projects, involving more than Rs11 lakh crore and related to various sectors, like energy, power, coal, roads and highways, aviation and other infrastructure segments, are significantly delayed and many of them don’t even have a date for completion.
This has raised concerns within the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) and, according to sources privy to developments, ministers heading these ministries as well as the concerned top bureaucrats are likely to be pulled up for the delays at a high-level meeting scheduled tentatively for November 4.
According to details available with this newspaper, a total of about 700 projects are to be reviewed at the meeting. The original cost of these projects was around Rs 10 lakh crore. However owing to delays and cost overruns, they no-w are valued at more than Rs 11 lakh crore. Though around 100 projects of the 700 to be reviewed are said to be on schedule, roughly 300 are delayed. But what is more disturbing is that 320 projects don’t even have an exact date by which they are to be completed.
The PMO is annoyed at the delays and cost overruns in hundred of projects and sources within the government said there was a lot of hectic activity within the concerned ministries to ensure that something concrete can be presented before the PM at a November 4 review meet.
Of the 300-odd projects which are delayed, around 200 are facing cost overruns. Officials, in fact, have admitted that normally during the monthly review meetings conducted by Prime Minister Modi, where even state bureaucrats are present via video-conference, solutions are promptly drawn out for even those projects which have been hanging for quite some time.
This, they said, shows how proactively the bureaucracy has started functioning ever since the Prime Minister started holding these meetings.
Sources said that the Prime Minister earlier this year had expressed his dissatisfaction over delays in execution of various infrastructure projects mainly due to litigation and asked the concerned departments to take up the issue at the judicial level.
Despite the reminder, delays in such projects is likely to raise the heat on the concerned departments, the sources added.
