Bhubaneswar: In an effort to encourage panchayats to enhance their performances, the state government has issued guidelines for release and use of incentives to panchayats under fourth state finance commission (SFC) for 2016-17 to 2019-20, sources said Monday.
As per the guidelines issued by the state finance department recently, the state government would spend `75.36crore as incentives to the panchayats between 2016-17 and 2019-20. The government will spend `18.84 crore in this regard annually.
The purpose of SFC recommendation is to emphasise resource generation by the GPs. Annual competitions among the GPs at panchayat samiti level would be conducted and two best GPs would get a reward of `3 lakh each as incentive, sources said.
The government has also fixed certain criteria for the incentives. A panchayat should enhance its revenue generation by 20 per cent to be eligible to get the incentives.
Panchayats must submit audited account details of a particular year within two years. It means, panchayats should prepare and submit audited accounts of 2014-15 fiscal to get grants in 2016-17 financial year, the sources said.
The incentive grants to the panchayat should be utilised to create and maintenance income generating assets. To maintain transparency, the GPs should keep corroborative photographs of the projects before commencement, during implementation and after execution for record, the guidelines said.
The utilised funds will be audited by the local fund audits which will also be inspected by CAG.
In order to monitor performances of GPs on SFC utilisation, the government has developed e-Dakshyat, an online platform. The panchayats have been instructed to upload all details on the web portal.
Notably, the government had earlier issued guidelines for utilisation of Central Finance Commission grants.
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