With one week remaining in the financial year, the city Corporation’s plan expenditure this year stood at 55.25%, as on Wednesday.
Considering the number of bills that are remaining to be submitted and passed from the treasury, the civic body officials expect the expenditure for the year to be anywhere between 65 to 70%.
According to city Corporation Secretary Binu Francis, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the local body elections had reduced the time and resources available for the Corporation last year. “During this financial year, much of the time was lost in various activities to contain COVID-19 and in relief efforts. Almost from March to August, the Corporation was focussed only on COVID-19 related activities. Later, almost two months was used up during the local body elections, during which many of the employees here were deployed for election work. Now, for the past few weeks, quite a few employees have again been deployed for the assembly election work. So, the time available for plan implementation during this financial year was quite less,” Mr.Francis told The Hindu. This year, the Thiruvananthapuram Corporation has a total plan fund allocation of ₹390.14 crore, out of which ₹215.53 crore has been spent till now.
Third place
Among the six municipal Corporations in the State, the city now stands at third place in plan expenditure, with Kochi at 79.37% and Kozhikode at 60.53%, but these Corporations have only total plan funds of ₹183.56 and ₹187.17 respectively, allocated for the year.
According to Mr.Francis, the bills of quite a few civil works are set to be cleared this week, which will ramp up the expenditure figures. Civil works had come to a halt during the initial months of the pandemic. Consequently, many of the works are just being completed, after which the bills will be cleared.
More to be cleared
Since there are no treasury restrictions as of now, compared to the situation last year, bills of larger amounts can be expected to be cleared in the coming days.
A total of 686 bills under the development funds and 166 bills under the maintenance fund of the city Corporation have been passed this year at the district treasury.
