The present fiscal year is about to end but more than half of the funds allocated for Development Plan of Mumbai by BMC in previous budget is yet to be spend. Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) had allocated Rs 647.27 crore in Budget 2018-19 to execute Development plan 2034. However, only 46.76 per cent of this amount i.e. about 303 crore was put to use till December 2018. As the budget 2019-20 is set to be announced on February 4, many of the projects still remain on paper so far and their execution is still pending.
This was not just the case during last year. Prior to that in the budget 2017-18, Rs. 551.56 crore was announced to be spend under the development plan, but the actual expenditure was only 70 per cent of this amount. Experts opine that since development plan department was focused on Development plan 2034 last year, it consumed their lot of time which resulted in delay in implementing the projects.
“DP 2034 was published in May 2016. After planning committee’s objections and suggestions, the corporation debated the draft,” BMC commissioner Ajoy Mehta had said last year. “But the draft DP was submitted for state government’s sanction in August 2017, and it received the state’s nod only in 2018. During this process, a lot of work regarding sanctioning of proposals was almost at a standstill”, he had further said. “For close to five months, there was stagnation because of the new DP coming in. In the upcoming financial year we expect the BMC to align its online process with the DP 2034 to make things better,” senior architect Manoj Daisaria told DNA.
