The Indian Express: Pune: Wednesday, June 27, 2018.
As per
responses to an RTI queries, the delay and ‘limited’ disbursement of the
sanctioned fund not only escalated the total cost but ended up almost doubling
it, to Rs 116.20 crore.
A decade on,
the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology is yet to disburse over
30 per cent of the sum sanctioned for the construction of an Innovation Park
for the Pune-based Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC).
Since its
inception in the late 1980s, C-DAC, a premier IT-solutions wing of the
government, has been functioning from a rented building on the campus of the
Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU). Part of its operations was conducted
at another rented premises in Aundh.
In September
2016, the Innovation Park, a multi-storey “partially completed” building at
Pashan, was inaugurated by Union Minister for Electronics and Information
Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad. Operations of the Aundh unit were subsequently
shifted to the Innovation Park.
However,
one-and-a-half years after it was thrown open for operations, the project
remains cash-strapped and the construction of the building is yet to be
completed. Most of C-DAC’s operations continue to take place from the offices
and labs at the SPPU campus.
Responses to
queries filed by The Indian Express, under the Right to Information (RTI) Act,
have revealed that Rs 60.47 crore was sanctioned for the construction of the
Innovation Park. It was scheduled to be disbursed in two phases, from 2007 to
2014, and from 2014 to 2017. While, the actual sanctioned sum at the start the
project was Rs 66.40 crore, the total budget was revised in 2014 to Rs 60.47
crore.
However, the
ministry has only disbursed a sum of Rs 42.88 crore in the last decade.
As per
responses to the RTI queries, the delay and ‘limited’ disbursement of the
sanctioned fund not only escalated the total cost but ended up almost doubling
it, to Rs 116.20 crore.
The documents
reveal that in the years after the funds were sanctioned, in 2007-2008 and 2009-2010,
the highest amounts Rs 12 crore and Rs 17 crore, respectively were disbursed by
the ministry. The ministry didn’t release any money during the financial year
2008-2009 and for three consecutive financial years 2011-2012, 2012-2013 and
2013-2014 derailing the project towards the end of its first phase.
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