Patna: Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar on Tuesday said he was in favour of the selection of MPLAD projects
strictly through a tender process and not MPs selecting it,
if the Centre wanted it to be implemented by a state agency.
Kumar said the state government had also suggested that
the Centre should give an additional six per cent of the MPLAD
fund to meet the establishment cost if it wanted that a state
agency be tasked with the implementation.
"The Centre has recently written to us that it is ready
to give two per cent of the project cost to meet the
establishment cost of the state agency which will be engaged
in implementation of MPLAD", he said.
"We want to try and push forward the demand of
providing six per cent of the additional cost of the MPLAD
projects to meet the establishment cost of the organisation to
be engaged in the task", he said.
"We have now now decided to set up a Regional
Engineering Organisation (REO) led by a Chief Engineer after
the MLAs/MLCs Local Area Development schemes were scrapped by
us", he said.
"The REO will work to implement the schemes under MPLAD
maintaining full transparency.... The MPs will be sending the
list of the projects and the REO will submit the estimates for
each of the projects", he said, adding only after the
clearance obtained from MPs, the REP would take up the process
of issuing tenders for executing the jobs.
PTI
First Published: Tuesday, July 19, 2011, 16:41