A State Cabinet meeting on Friday held under the chairmanship of Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik took 14 decisions pertaining to the Departments of Social Security and Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities, Water Resources, Commerce and Transport, Fisheries and Animal Resource Development, General Administration , Higher Education, Law, Planning and Convergence, Revenue and Disaster Management besides Steel and Mines.Chief Secretary Suresh Chandra Mahapatra said the major decisions included promotion of the use of electric vehicles through different kinds of incentives. In order to reduce the rapid global temperature which is a concern for everyone, it is now necessary to reduce the emissions caused by different categories of vehicles using the traditional fossil fuels since they are contributing a lot for the climate change.
The objective of the policy is to achieve adoption of 20% battery electric vehicles in all vehicle registrations by 2025, promote manufacture of electric vehicles and their components including battery in the State, promote innovation and facilitate research and development in the areas relating to e-vehicles and battery.
It was decided to extend financial incentives for manufacturing industries, purchase incentives, scrapping incentives, interest subvention in loans and waiving of road tax and registration fees during the policy period. The Cabinet also approved an Odisha Sand Policy-2021 in accordance with the environmental regulations to ensure adequate supply of sand for developmental and welfare projects, private construction works, to prevent the scope of illegal mining of sand and ensure a robust monitoring mechanism for mining with use of IT-based regulation of the sand mining from identification of source to final end-users.
The salient features of the policy are demand -supply estimation, identification of sources, DGPS survey of sand sairat sources, auction of mining rights, mining plan (MP), environment clearance (EC) and other statutory clearances, quarrying operation, inter-State transportation of sand and monitoring and enforcement.In a move to provide relief to the employees in private educational institutions, the Cabinet decided that the principals of these institutions who were declared as drawing and disbursing officers (DDOs) would be the provisional pension sanctioning authority for the employees other than him/her. The provisional pensions of the principals would be sanctioned by the concerned regional directors.
An agenda bid for construction of thick plastic concrete cutoff wall at the heel of the left side earth dam of the Kanpur irrigation project in Keonjhar district was also approved in the meeting. The work would be completed in 11 months.