By Staff Reporter
The Scheme for Special Assistance to States for Capital Investment for the year 2022-23 with an outlay of ₹6,000 crores and for the year 2023-24 with an outlay of ₹15,000 crores was launched by Department of Expenditure, Ministry of Finance under which component of ‘Urban Reforms’ are being monitored by Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs. During the Special Assistance scheme for States for the year 2022-23 from the total outlay of ₹6000 Crore, an amount of ₹4598.22 crore was recommended by MoHUA to Ministry of Finance in respect of 13 participating states under Part VI of the Scheme for “Urban Reforms”. However, a total amount of ₹4093.16 crore has been released by Department of Expenditure, Ministry of Finance. The incentive amount was released from the Department of Expenditure to the respective State Governments to be utilized by 31st March, 2023. Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs does not monitor utilization of incentives released to the States.
Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) has been conducting handholding workshops/ conferences/ training programmes for the capacity building of State Government officials/ULBs. Recently during 13-14th July, 2023 MoHUA had organized a National Urban Planning Conclave for creating sustainable cities in which more than 1000 officials from various State Governments/ULBs and Academic Institutes all over India, officials of multi-lateral institutions such as, World Bank, Asian Development Bank (ADB) GESELLSCHAFT FÜR INTERNATIONALE ZUSAMMENARBEIT (GIZ), Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) etc. had attended. An exhibition was also held to showcase the Best Practices in Urban Planning by various State Town Planning Departments and Planning Institutes for the benefit of attendees. Under the Sub Scheme on Formulation of Geographical Information System (GIS) Based Master Plan for AMRUT Cities, 77 trainings programmes have been conducted and 2900 officials have been trained on use of Geographical Information System (GIS) and remote sensing technology in urban planning.
