Chief Secy Sudhansh Pant’s concerned approach towards revenue collection gets officials on toes!

Jaipur: Chief Secretary Sudhansh Pant is extremely concerned about filling up the state coffers and thus, for the past fifteen days, he has been working tirelessly to ensure that the collection target is achieved. For this purpose, he is monitoring the day to day progress of the five main departments that bring in most revenue - Excise, Transport, Mines, Commercial Taxes and Registration of Stamps. He has engaged Collectors of all fifty districts in this work. He has also gathered the detailed statistics of Division wise, district wise and department wise achieved targets and has issued the same for everyone to see. This is perhaps for the first time in the administrative history of the state that a Chief Secretary is being seen in such an unprecedented role.

CS Sudhansh Pant’s concern regarding revenue collection was observed on Wednesday too during the Senior Officers Meeting (SOM). At the start of the meeting, he expressed concern over non-achievement of revenue targets and gave information that only four days are left in the end of financial year and the state’s exchequer is still twenty thousand crore rupees short of its revised target (which was lowered considerably than the budget target). He stressed that there are three more days of leave for the government in the days to come. Secretary Finance (Revenue) KK Pathak could not satisfy CS with the statistics.

And when the time came to discuss the Budget and Expenditure, more than half a dozen Secretaries complained to the CS of the Finance department not releasing their rightful money. Although Secretary Finance (Expenditure) - NK Thakral and Director Budget - Brijesh Sharma - gave their clarifications on this aspect, the CS appeared to be unsatisfied and unimpressed. According to CS’s instructions, every District Collector is chairing meetings of five revenue earning depts of their districts on a daily basis and thereafter they send daily online progress report to CS. Based on these details, different tables have been created of details till March 26. And these tables have made everything crystal clear. CS considers the performance of Excise and Commercial taxes dept to be poor.

Administrative experts are surprised with CS’s keen interest and concern regarding revenue collection.