While the Union Rural Development Ministry is doling out huge funds for UPA’s flagship programmes like rural job guarantee and road construction schemes, no serious efforts are taken to strengthen the Vigilance and Monitoring Committee (V&MC) set up in the States to monitor the expenditure.
The schemes are audited but active V&MC, which has an elected representative (MP) as one of its members, can ensure one more layer of vigilance to the programmes currently marred with corruption and irregularities.
As per the guidelines, four meetings (every quarter) are to be convened by the Member Secretary of State and district-level committees in a year, but many V&MCs are rarely doing that, thus depriving the MPs from getting input on how the money is being spent and whether it is properly spent.
As per the latest data from the RD Ministry, only 29 State level meetings have been reported in 2012-13 while just nine in 2013-14 till September 2.
Also, only West Bengal has reported four State level meetings whereas 11 States did not held a single State level Meeting during 2012-13. These States are — Bihar, Goa, Gujarat, Jammu & Kashmir, Jharkhand, Meghalaya, Odisha, Punjab, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu and Uttarakhand.
At district level too, the performance has been pathetic. Around 806 meetings
in 421 districts have been reported during the year 2012-13 and 189 meetings were held in 180 districts during 2013-14 till September 2, 2013, as per the data.
As many as 200 districts in various States/UTs have not reported even a single meeting during the year 2012-13. These districts are in Andhra Pradesh (four), Arunachal Pradesh (six), Assam (eight), Bihar (22), Chhattisgarh (one), Goa (one), Gujarat (one), Himachal Pradesh (10), J&K (22), and Jharkhand (10).
The others are — Karnataka (one), Madhya Pradesh (five), Maharashtra (two), Manipur (six), Nagaland (11), Odisha (four), Punjab (five), Rajasthan (10), Sikkim (two), Tamil Nadu (16), Uttar Pradesh (38), West Bengal (10), Andaman & Nicobar Islands (one), Daman &Diu (one), Dadra & Nagar Haveli (two) and Puducherry (one).
In fact, some States like — Goa, Punjab, lakshadweep and Puducherry have constituted State and District level V&MC just recently in July, 2010 and September, 2010 respectively.
The sources further said posts of non-official members and NGOs were lying vacant in majority of the V&MCs. The Centre has blamed circumstances like elections, natural calamities etc in the States, difficulty in deciding date for meeting and pre-occupation of member secretary as well as on the apathy of the State Governments for poor performance of the panels.
In the 2013-14 annual Budget, the Finance Ministry has hiked the RD Ministry’s allocation by a 46 per cent from Rs 55,000 crore in 2012-13 to Rs 80,194 crore.