Srinagar, Oct 29: The J&K government officials Friday held an interaction with NITI Aayog on improving expenditure outcomes and governance efficiencies in J&K.
Chief Secretary Arun Kumar Mehta along with the senior Administrative Secretaries of various departments participated in the meeting.
Laying out priorities of the government, the Chief Secretary said that though J&K had moved to more transparent financial systems and had the right fundamentals in place for qualitative transformation, in areas like expenditure outcomes, contract management and capacity building of the district officers, there was a need to urgently reform for more efficient and sustained growth.
Mehta said that despite 1 to 10 teacher-pupil ratio, which was amongst the best in the world, there were serious issues of learning outcomes even as the enrolment ratio in schools was less than optimal and the gender parity continued to be a concern.
He said that the time had come to make a switch towards measuring outcomes and quantifying outputs and linking it to the allocation of resource allocation.
In his presentation, Director General Development, Monitoring and Evaluation Office, NITI AayogShekhar Bono outlined the shift in focus that had happened in the central government from tracking inputs to monitoring outputs and measuring outcomes.
He said that the central ministries and departments were required to identify and target specific outcomes and the resource allocation was linked to clear outlining of these objectives in the budget proposals.
Bono said that this reimagining of the whole paradigm of planning and execution of the projects had improved efficiencies in the system.
He said that NitiAayog was planning to set up 500 Atal Tinkering labs in J&K.
Earlier, participating in the interaction, Administrative Secretary Agriculture, J&K, Navin K Choudhary outlined the data deficiencies as one of the concerns for planning.
He laid emphasis on conducting a manpower audit in J&K government in the context of the changed realities of the present times where considerable automation has happened, leading to redundancies at multiple levels across the government.
While stating that there was a need to ascertain the customer satisfaction levels in J&K, Administrative Secretary, Health and Medical Education department, VivekBhardawaj said that NITI Aayog could help the department in preparing a framework to enable the department to identify the medically un-served areas so that establishment of sub centres, health centres and medical facilities was done based on an objective criteria.