Kerala: More financial powers to secretaries, department heads

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: In view of the ongoing crisis related to Covid-19 outbreak, the government has decided to give more financial powers to district collectors and secretaries of departments, thereby reducing the delay in procurement of essential items.
All the secretaries of departments have been given the powers to spend up to Rs 10 crore for procuring any essential item that has been decided in the crisis management group meeting or chief minister’s review meeting to fight Covid-19.The secretaries have been given the powers for procurement without further circulating the papers on the basis of stores purchase rules as per the laid down procedure. Similarly, all the district collectors, department heads and managing directors of PSUs have been given the powers to procure any such essentials spending a maximum of Rs 5 crore at a time.
While doing so, the secretaries and district collectors have been asked to certify that the rates accepted for procurement are fair and reasonable up on a practicable market enquiry.
For procurement above Rs 10 crore and up to Rs 100 crore, of a critical item that was certified by a secretary or head of the departmentconcerned, a committeeconsisting of the concerned secretary, finance secretary and secretary of disaster management department has to give clearance while any procurement that will run beyond Rs 100 crore, will have to be cleared by a committee headed by the chief secretary, secretary of the concerned department, finance secretary and the secretary of disaster management department.
Under usual circumstances, the financial powers are much lower to the tune of up to Rs 5 lakh for the department heads and up to Rs 20 lakh for the secretaries of departments.
Larger funds allocated under annual plan arespentby the departments after constituting working groups and special working groups and placing the projects and procurements before them to get the funds sanctioned.
Those projects below Rs 10 crore are forwarded to a working group that is chaired by the secretary of the concerned department, and the projects that have a budget of more than Rs 10 crore are to be scrutinized by a special working group chaired by the finance secretary that also includes the secretary of the administrative department.
The constitution and meeting of the working groups and special working groups itself is a timeconsuming process, in effect cutting short the implementation time for each of the projects.