Out of 75 districts in Uttar Pradesh, Ambedkar Nagar has best implemented government schemes and has topped CM’s Monitoring Dashboard. Under leadership of DM Avinash Singh, administration has scored 83.6 point out of 100 till November 2023.
The district met MANREGA’s annual targets one month before the year ended. The reason behind this sterling performance is better coordination amid departments, timely implementation, frequent review meeting and fixing accountability.
Indian Masterminds interacted with the 2019 batch IAS officer and CDO of Ambedkar Nagar district, Mr Anuraj Jain, to find out the secret behind the achievement.
CM MONITORING DASHBOARD
CM Monitoring Dashboard has been set up for evaluation of officers at various levels in all government projects. It is an essential tool for real-time and dynamic monitoring of various projects and schemes.
For this, the Chief Minister Office (CMO) has created key performers indicators. There are many standards for the better and timely implementation of any government scheme and targets are given to districts.Like, number of pension cases disposed in time. Number of people given tele-radiology reports within 6 hours of the scan, or the response time of the ambulance. Similarly, other schemes are monitored on dashboard and marks given for each scheme. Finally after the cumulative total, all 75 districts are ranked.
THE MODEL
Ambedkar Nagar district has created its own model for such fabulous performance. There are over 100 schemes of more than 50 departments. But,the CM dashboard monitors only two schemes. Key departments like education or medical have slightly higher number of schemes. Ambedkar Nagar incidentally has negligible number of pendency of schemes.
The district works on basically three parameters – identification of problems & the issues, setting the goals, providing additional resource and completing them in time.
Mr Jain said, “The identification of problems and the issues is our first step. After that, we worked to resolve these issue and set our goals and time frame. All the goals have to be completed in time. After that, we also provided them additional resource if needed.”
The administration provides them resources and extra manpower from other departments. And when the work is completed, they ensure its entry is made digitally on the portal.
THE IMPLEMENTATION
COORDINATION: For better Interdepartmental coordination, Administration holds meetings with all departments for better coordination on the ground.
The backlogs in disposal of application forms in different departments from block to municipality and SDMs level was resolved promptly. For this, DM and CDO held several rounds of review meetings, asking them to speed up. Regular updates were taken from the nodal officers of every department.
ACCOUNTABILITY: Fixing the accountability is another key area where administration focused. Everyone from SDMs to other officers were made accountable. Nodal officer were appointed for every scheme but monitoring was done only by the SDM. Mr Jain said, “We took updates from the SDM as to why the schemes were not implemented or why there was a delay and what was the reason behind it.”
MAKING TECH FRIENDLY: Since most older employees are not so tech friendly, administration worked on it. All of employees were trained, so that they become tech-savvy.
Mr Jain said, “Many construction projects had been completed but their entries had not been done in portal. With officers becoming technically sound, performance improved on the portal too.”
INTER-DEPARTMENTAL COORDINATION: In schemes like Fertilizer DBT where funds come from different departments, the district administration had to coordinate with the concerned department too ensure timely delivery.
Three review meetings, a month ensured seamless monitoring and timely corrective steps. Mr Jain said, “This is how we ironed out all the roadblocks.”
