Presiding over all Secretaries meeting held on Tuesday, Chief Secretary Aditya Prasad Padhi directed the Principal Secretaries and Secretaries of all departments for hassle free and timely delivery of various public services to people.
People build up confidence in the system when they get timely and appropriate services as per their entitlement without hurdles or running from pillar to post, he said. The Secretaries were advised to undertake sample checks of the actual service delivery at filed level.
Padhi further directed that the certificates having long period validity like education, caste, birth, death and nativity etc be issued once physically. Such certificates once issued should be stored in open public data base under digital locker so that concerned authority or the individual himself can download it as and when necessary. The citizen will not be required go through the process once gain to get an updated certificate, he said.
Development Commissioner R Balakrishnan participating in the discussion suggested having regular interface among training institutes of different departments so that the available infrastructure can be put to maximum utilization. He also advised to have direct linkage between the content of learning in the institutes and actual operations being done in departments.
It was decided to constitute a committee for making a detail plan for achieving better synergy among the institutes in terms of infrastructure and resources.
Special Secretary General Administration Ashok Kumar Meena presented the updates about the progress in implementation of Odisha Right to Public Services Act (ORTPSA). As of now, around 44.12 lakh applications have been received in 14 departments under this Act out of which 33.65 lakh applications have been disposed. The balance applications are in process. The Chief Secretary directed to dispose those applications within the prescribed time limit.
Review showed that as per earlier directions of the Chief Secretary, the CMGI has already prepared Service Delivery Manual under ORTPSA for each notified service involving nodal officers from 22 major service dealing departments. Chief Secretary Padhi directed Principal Secretaries and Secretaries to review the manual of the services of their departments and finalise those for publication. The CMGI is developing the Common Application Portal for all online G2C services in various departments. The departments like Home, Social Security and Empowerment of Persons with Disability, Skill Development, ST and SC Development, Works, Fisheries and Animal Resource development, Cooperation and Higher Education have adopted it. Other departments were advised to adopt the same portal.
The Chief Secretary also reviewed fiscal performance of the departments during the financial year 2016-2017. It was seen that State Plan expenditure during 2016-17 increased by 8.19 per cent over the previous year.
The total State plan expenditure in 2016-17 was around Rs 43,896 crore against the expenditure of Rs 40, 572 crore during the FY 2015-16. The utilisation in agriculture and allied sector was around 92 per cent of the total budget estimate of Rs 11,943 crore. Similarly, the infrastructure spending crossed 90 per cent of the total budget estimate of Rs 13,938 crore. Social sector spending followed the similar pattern with total expenditure of around Rs 17,559 crore by end of March.
The revenue collection from own tax resources touched Rs 22, 802 crore against the total own tax collection of Rs 22,526 crore during 2015-16. The collection from non-tax revenue has also touched Rs 30, 2328 crore.