Yogi govt ministers bracing for 100-Day report card

Sources say the ministers are now burning the midnight oil to prepare their report cards

Even before the anxiety caused by the overnight stay of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Lucknow fades away, ministers in the Yogi Adityanath government are bracing up to present their 100-day report card.

On April 28, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath had announced that he was working on a 100-day agenda to transform the way governance was being delivered in the state. He had also directed his council of ministers to issue a ‘White Paper’ on their respective departments, on the completion of first 100 days of the dispensation.

Soon after taking over, CM Yogi had set in motion a series of meetings, calling upon the respective departments to apprise him about their financial health, progress and funds required for future projects and schemes. About 15 such meetings took place and collectively clocked 75-100 hours of presentations. Some meetings even went beyond midnight, a first of sorts in the much maligned UP power corridors.

According to sources, the ministers are now burning the midnight oil to prepare their report cards, which would present broad contours with regards to the utilisation of funds in the past five years, projects underway, cost and time overruns of projects, future plans and prospective funds requirements.

At the same time, the 100-day report card would offer a deep insight into the working of these departments under the previous Akhilesh Yadav government, which had launched a number of flagship projects in different sectors such as roads, expressways, health, education and urban development. The collective budgetary outlay for these projects spanned several thousands crores of rupees.

Some of the flagship projects included Agra-Lucknow Expressway, Gomti Riverfront Development and Janeshwar Mishra Park.

In fact, the Yogi government is already probing the Agra-Lucknow Expressway and Gomti Riverfront Development projects for alleged financial irregularities and huge cost overruns.

For example, Gomti Riverfront was estimated to cost Rs 1,500 crore and while the bulk of the funds had been released and utilised, only 60 per cent of the work is complete. Earlier, Yogi had set up a commission under Justice (retired) Alok Kumar Singh to look into the project. Its findings had highlighted cases of wrongdoing on the part of senior government officials, engineers and contractors.

Later, the state constituted another committee chaired by UP cabinet minister Suresh Khanna to study the Justice Singh report and recommend action. Now that this report has also been submitted, the state government is understood to be contemplating recommending a CBI probe in the matter.

The Agra-Lucknow Expressway is also under the Yogi scanner. The project, estimated at Rs 15,000 crore, is under scrutiny for an alleged scam in which farm land was passed off as residential land, in order to fetch higher compensation. The state has directed the respective district magistrates to probe all large land deals over the last two years.