Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh Friday got its own project monitoring group (PMG) similar to the one constituted by the union government to expedite stalled big infrastructure projects.
Senior IAS officer and PMG chairman Anil Swarup launched the web portal “Online Projects Management System” for Uttar Pradesh at the CII UP state office here.
e-PMS, the online projects management system, has been developed using open source technology for tracking projects with investment between Rs.100 crore and Rs.1,000 crore, officials said.
They added it was on CII’s request that the cabinet secretariat brought down the threshold limit to Rs.100 crore.
The government of India had set up Project Monitoring Group (PMG) under the cabinet secretariat to facilitate clearance of infrastructure projects by bringing all ministries and departments concerned on the same platform.
Uttar Pradesh is the fifth state to launch it after Odisha, Uttarakhand, Kerala and Chhattisgarh.
“I am glad to announce here that Uttar Pradesh government has set up the group,” Swarup said.
Earlier, he held a meeting of the group with state officials where UP Chief Secretary Alok Ranjan assured that the state PMG will interact at least twice a month. He also emphasised that the government needs such a system and will make effective use of it.
“Now, we have the sophisticated version of the software,” Swarup said. He added: “This system has been designed in such a way it will enhance efficiency, bring transparency and improve communication between industries and government besides state and Centre or vice versa. It automates the entire tracking of stalled investment projects in the context of bottlenecks.”
Swarup, who is additional secretary and chairman, PMG with the cabinet secretariat, said that “42 percent of our problems are related to environment. Come July 1, we are going to digitize the entire process of forest clearances.”
Officials said that through the new mechanism, industries can create their login credential with this platform and the same can be used to submit projects with issues.
When any project with an issue is being added by an industry to the state PMG, the portal shall automatically push the data to the respective ministry at the state level. Once the project is being endorsed by the state-level nodal officer, it shall also be automatically routed to the central PMG, if there are any issues/bottlenecks related to the union government.
Industries get immediate response from the automatic mailer and they can see the current status of concerned projects through this platform immediately after the sub-group meeting is over.