Officers of Youth Affairs, Sports dept to monitor projects in districts

In a bid to expedite the work of the dream projects of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, the state Youth Affairs Department and Sports Department have engaged a set of senior officers to visit all the districts for two days every week to monitor progress of different schemes and projects.

Aroop Biswas, who is the minister of both the departments, held the monthly review meeting on Thursday in an office at Netaji Indoor Stadium and raised the need for a better monitoring to ensure proper implementation of the projects.

Lakshmi Ratan Shukla, minister of state for the departments and senior officials were present in the meeting.

Sources said that Friday and Saturday are the two days in a week when the officers from Kolkata have to go to their respective districts to monitor the progress of the development projects taken up the departments.

Districts have been divided among the officers in Thursday’s meeting itself and they would start visiting the places from November 11 onwards.

At present there are three joint secretaries and four deputy secretary level officers in the state Sports department while there are three joint secretaries and three deputy secretaries in the Youth Affairs department.

All the 13 officers will be visiting the districts of which they have been given responsibility to look after the progress of work of their respective departments.

Sayed Ahmed Baba, principal secretary of both the Youth Affairs and Sports departments, will be holding a review meeting every week and the 13 officers have to place the progress report of each projects in the weekly review meeting.

At present the Sports department has taken up projects to develop stadiums and sports complexes in districts. Construction has begun at most of the places.

Renovation and development of youth hostels have been taken up by the Youth Affairs department besides helping people in the districts to get benefits of the different schemes introduced by the state government.

The department has set March 2017 as the deadline to complete the ongoing project for development of the youth hostels.

“Thus to complete all the projects on time and to reach the set target of implementing a particular scheme, a better monitoring is quite essential and this is a quite significant move taken up by the department to expedite work of the ongoing projects,” said a senior officer of the youth affairs department adding that it would also ensure proper utilisation of the money allotted for a particular project or scheme.

It may be mentioned that after the change of the guard in the state in 2011, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had initiated visiting districts and held administrative review meeting to check progress of different projects in each district.

It had immensely helped in bringing an overall development.

Moreover, she had stressed upon focusing in districts to identify local talents and to provide them all facilities to send them to a bigger arena.

“Thus by introducing the system of weekly visit to districts by officers from the departments would no more allow unnecessary delay in completion of a project. Instead it may get completed before the set deadline,” the officer said.