Crucial decisions
The new Governor has taken path breaking decisions for the completion of many projects in J&K State and in the different high level meetings he has said that developmental activities in this hilly State should be the priority of the administration.
In order provide fillip to the developmental activities across the State, the State Administrative Council which met recently under the chairmanship of Governor, Shri Satya Pal Malik approved an amount of Rs 8000 crores for completing all languishing projects in the state. For this purpose, the SAC approved the establishment of a new infrastructure company, the Jammu and Kashmir Infrastructure Development Finance Corporation (JKIDFC). The JKIDFC has been authorized to raise a loan not exceeding Rs 8000 crores from various financial Institutions including State/ Nationalized Banks for completion of these unfunded, languishing projects.
A persistent difficulty encountered in the development process has been the large number of languishing and unfunded projects. These developmental projects which are at different stages of execution are either inadequately funded or have been left incomplete due to one or the other reason. Some of them have been languishing for over 5 years resulting not only in blocking of funds spent on them but also in cost escalation and time overruns. A tentative assessment by the State Planning, Development and Monitoring Department (PD&MD) indicated that incomplete projects worth over Rs 10000 crores were at various stages and that over Rs 6000 crores would be required to complete all of them in one go. The State Planning department has further analyzed that six departments namely PW(R&B), PHE/I&FC, School Education, Higher Education, Youth Services and Sports, Health and Medical Education and Tourism taken together accounted for nearly two thirds of the total unfunded burden; the projects in these 6 departments alone account for nearly Rs. 4000 crores.
