For the first time in the history of the 160-year-old Central Public Works Department (CPWD), Urban Development Minister Venkaiah Naidu addressed 30,000 employees at 33 centres across the country simultaneously via video-conference, wherein he advocated an image makeover for the organization and asked it to strive towards changing public perception about it.
In a bid to ensure timely completion of projects, transparency and accountability in the functioning of the largest public construction agency, the Minister on Tuesday announced a slew of measures from the next fiscal.
These included payments to be made to contractors only after social and third party audit of works costing more than Rs5 crore, all 274 divisions to make online payments only and all circles and field units to have bio-metric attendance markers by the end of 2015.
The Minister further announced that all project managers will have to reside at the site of work while all cases of pending promotions will be cleared by February this year.
“Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s suggestion of enhancing skills, speed and scale is most suited to CPWD given its scale of operations, skills required and speedy delivery of services and should be adopted forthwith to survive the growing competition,” Naidu said.
The Minister noted that as part of ongoing efforts to streamline functioning of the CPWD, all relevant information about 7,000 projects costing over Rs30,000 crore has been placed in public domain and assured the employees that CPWD and the Ministry would do the needful to create better working conditions for them.
Informing the employees that he would interact with all of them once in three months, Naidu urged them to rise to the occasion collectively and assured them there would not be any interference in their working.
last September, Naidu had suggested a 15-point charter of action to improve the functioning of the CPWD. The measures included standard operating procedures, including specific timeframes to be evolved for |each construction activity and enforcing accountability by taking action against officers responsible for delays in execution of works.