By Laxman Kafle
Kathmandu, Jan. 19: Local levels, seeking special and supplementary grants that are to be provided by the federal government, have applied for budgets to carry out upwards of 3,000 projects for the coming fiscal year 2021/22. Applying for grants through electronic means, the local levels proposed budget for about 1,599 projects under supplementary grants and 1,450 under special grant, said Dr. Krishna Prasad Oli, member of the National Planning Commission (NPC).
He said that the NPC had asked the local levels to submit the proposals for the projects and programmes for the special and supplementary grants provided by the federal government to carry out the priority projects of the local levels.
The supplementary grant is the amount that the federal government allows the local and provincial governments to implement infrastructure development projects.
"Out of applications received from the concerned bodies, we will select the projects based on necessity of the local levels and resources of the federal government," Oli said.
However, the applications received in the previous multi-year will go automatically for the next fiscal year, he said.
Before this, the projects and programmes used to be screened by the software, which rejected the projects that were applied without completing the required documents, he added.
"The software has been developed to screen the projects considering minimising the human interference while allocating budget. It will be easy to execute the projects immediately after allocating budget if the projects are selected based on the criteria," he told The Rising Nepal.
It has been stipulated that the preparation works for the projects and programmes should be completed before applying for the budget.
He said that the committee of the NPC would select the projects and programmes after completing screening by the system based on the importance of project, status of project, including Detail Project Reports (DPR) and other criteria.
About 3,000 projects of 753 local levels and seven provincial governments seeking support from the federal government were not large, he said, adding that the government could not allocate budget to those projects due to limited resources.