With three weeks remaining in the financial year, plan fund utilisation in Local Self Government bodies in the State stands at 59.51% as on Saturday.
As in most years, grama panchayats and block panchayats are leading in fund utilisation with 65.42% and 61.43%, while the six corporations have an average fund utilisation of 48.70%. Among Corporations, Thrissur is at first place with 64.22% and Thiruvananthapuram second with 55.15%.
The remaining few weeks will witness frenetic submission and passing of bills. A total of 8,118 bills, amounting to ₹155.62 crore, remains pending with the treasury currently, with more to be submitted in the coming days. The preparation of the annual plan has been happening quite early before the end of the previous financial year since 2017-18, allowing the local bodies an entire year for implementation.
Yet, the recurring waves of COVID-19 and floods have slowed down implementation, leading to the old problem of passing all the bills together at year end. In the previous year, as much as 30% of bills in the Thiruvananthapuram Corporation were passed in the last month. This year too, the situation will be no different, with the civic body expecting to increase the expenditure from the current level of 55.15% to at least 75-80%.
Most of the urban local bodies have this year got additional plan allocations early this year in January as part of plan revisions. According to local body officials, the various corporations had to evolve new plans for spending these funds. The addition of these funds also would have brought down the fund utilisation of these local bodies. For instance, the Thiruvananthapuram Corporation got an additional ₹58 crore in January.
The fund utilisation is lesser in projects focussing on women due to restrictions imposed in recent years on allocations to individual beneficiaries. Although 10% of the annual plan funds have to be earmarked for projects focussing on women, these have to be spent on general projects like women's facilitation centres or she lodges or employment generation measures. In previous years, local bodies were allowed to allocate it to individual beneficiaries for the construction of houses.
