Top bureaucrats from the Union finance ministry and the Planning Commission, who are incharge of a Rs10,000 crore corpus for green technology research, have knowingly approved non-research projects that do not qualify for such funding.
Top bureaucrats from the Union finance ministry and the Planning Commission, who are incharge of a Rs10,000 crore corpus for green technology research, have knowingly approved non-research projects that do not qualify for such funding.
According to the documents with DNA, top officials who were part of the Inter-ministerial group (IMG) set up to appraise projects under the National Clean Energy Fund (NCEF), knowingly approved projects that did not qualify for such funding.
In its report on Sunday, DNA had reported how the IMG went ahead and approved funding 100% of the project cost against the mandated 40% under the NCEF.
Documentary evidence reveals that the then Planning Commission member secretary Sudha Pillai and then secretary in the ministry of new and renewable energy sources (MNRE), Deepak Gupta, pitched for a regular project, already covered under central assistance, in the first meeting of the IMG in June last year.
At risk is the immense clean energy opportunity even as the country’s fuel import bill remains a burden on the exchequer. A Delhi-based think tank, the Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA), in its research pointed out that “Such inconsistencies will make the task of prioritising the NCEF funding and assessing its overall performance extremely difficult.”
Senior programme officer at CBGA, Gyana Ranjan Panda, feels that “there is a need to focus only on projects that genuinely promote green energy technologies and setting up a monitoring framework.”
In the first IMG meeting in June last year, Sudha Pillai pitched for a Rs13.30 crore project involving subsidy for solar lantern in the left wing extremist affected areas, a project remotely related to ‘green energy research’. Her logic being recorded in the ministry documents as ‘backwardness in the targeted area’.
Additionally, then MNRE secretary Deepak Gupta wanted NCEF resources for two National Solar Mission Projects worth Rs385 crore owing to funding problems from Planning Commission. Gupta is recorded in the minutes of the meeting as saying, “Secretary, MNRE informed the IMG that the projects are ministry’s regular schemes under the National Solar Mission and the funding is sought from the NCEF only due to the fact that the Planning Commission did not allocate sufficient funds.”
Interestingly, in the same IMG meeting the then finance secretary Sunil Mitra raised concerns over the misuse of NCEF.
“NCEF was conceived with a specific purpose, namely, to support research and innovative projects in clean energy technologies. The fund cannot be treated as an adjunct to the general budget,” said Mitra, as recorded in the minutes of the meeting. Despite this, expenditure secretary Sumit Bose nodded in favour of these projects.
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