The Cabinet Committee Investment (CCI) Project Monitoring Group led by Cabinet Secretariat Joint Secretary Dr VP Roy reviewed the progress of the ongoing mega projects in a high-level meeting under the Chairmanship of Chief Secretary Gokul Chandra Pati here on Tuesday.
A total number of 34 projects in railway, national highway, steel and mines and power sector were reviewed. Reviewing the progress, Chief Secretary Pati set timelines for completion of different tasks against each project. The project proponents and the administrative departments have been asked to comply with the timelines. The project developers required to do compensatory afforestation were advised to contact ORSAC for getting the degraded forest land for the purpose.
It may be pertinent here to mention that a land bank for compensatory afforestation has already been created in the State for expediting forest diversion proposals and grounding of projects.
The review shows that the issues relating to land acquisition and forest diversion proposals have made significant progress in many projects. The district administrations have been asked to provide all support in the event of law and order situations and deal with the miscreants strongly. Pati advised to the project proponents to implement the agreed decisions on rehabilitation and CSR activities quickly.
Notably, e-PMS, an online project monitoring system, has been put in place to monitor the projects involving investment between Rs100 crore and Rs1, 000 crore. The system tracks all stalled and ongoing investment projects in the context of the bottlenecks. The system includes facilities for online submission of projects, editing and updating of the projects, reviewing the projects and submission of details relating to bottlenecks, if any. The system has been made investor friendly and it automatically eliminates duplicate as well as inconsistent record keeping. Any private entrepreneur or any department or ministry willing to start a project can click on http//cabsec.gov.in or http//cadsec.nic.in to get their login credentials.
Replying to media queries, Cabinet Secretariat Joint Secretary Roy said, “We are doing this exercise regularly and significant improvement has taken place in progress of the projects. Many of the bottlenecks relating to land and forest diversion proposals have been removed and the projects have been put to first track.”
The major projects in the review included Bhubaneswar-Puri NH, Angul-Sambalpur toll road project, Cuttack-Angul toll road project, Biramitrapur-Barkot high way, Panikoili- Rimuli high way, IOCl project for lPG pipeline from Paradip-Durgapur, IOCl pipe line project from Paradip to Ranchi, MCl coal mines, Natraj underground mines, Hingula mines.