Flush with funds, but constituencies suffer

Hyderabad: Almost three years on, works under the Con-stituency Development Programme are proceeding at snail’s pace. Only 50 per cent of the work, taken up in 2014-15, has been completed.

The lack of follow-up action by MLAs and meagre interest by local officials is being blamed for the slow progress. 

The main problem when it comes to any government project is shortage of funds. But the CDP has no such problem. In the last three years, the government has sanctioned 26,033 works costing Rs 666 crore. Only 50.76 per cent of expenditure has been reported till now. 

Hyderabad district tops with the highest expenditure of Rs 63.37 crore while Rajanna Sircilla district has reported the lowest expenditure of Rs 1.88 crore.

To attend to local problems in constituencies, the government had sanctioned Rs 1.50 crore to each MLA and MLC till 2015-16. The government increased this amount to Rs 3 crore from 2016-17.  

Of the sanctioned works, 14,303 were completed (54.94 per cent); another 4,832 works are at various stages of progress while 6,898 have still not been started.

Khammam (58.97 per cent) tops the districts where work has not started, followed by Bhadrachalam-Kottagudem (55.33), Warangal Rural (52.34), Nirmal (50.47), Ranga Reddy (48.23), Manch-erial (46.14), Suryapet (44.43),  Jogulamba Gadwal (42.84), Wanaparthy (41.80) and Mahbubnagar (41.33 per cent) districts. These figures are higher than the state average of 26.50 per cent.  

Officials said these districts needed to take necessary measures to start execution of sanctioned works at the earliest.

In Bhadrachalam-Kottagudem district, of the 850 proposed works, 647 had been sanctioned. In Hyderabad district, of the 1,737 works, 1,560 had been sanctioned. About 500 works proposed by MLAs across the state have not yet been sanctioned.  

As per the constituency development guidelines, sanctions must be accorded within a period of 36 days from the date of receipt of proposals in the office of the district collector. 

The percentage of works not yet started against sanctioned works for 2014-15 was highest in Khammam (33.12 per cent), followed by Sangareddy, Bhadrachalam-Kottagudem (24.29) and Ranga Reddy (19.28%) districts, higher than the state average of 9.87 per cent.

The percentage of works not yet started against sanctioned works for 2015-16 was more the most again in Khammam (63.41 per cent). Bhadrachalam-Kottagudem (45.26) came next, followed by Nirmal (36.81), Wanaparthy (35.38), Yadadri (35.48), Vikarabad ( 35.27) and Nalgonda (35 per cent), against the state average of 20.04 per cent.