Union Minister for Urban Development M Venkaiah Naidu on Tuesday reached out to all the 30,000 employees of the public sector construction major Central Public Works Department (CPWD), sharing his concerns over the functioning of the organization and urging them for a change over in the public perception about it.
For the first time in the history of the 160 year old CPWD, Naidu addressed all its employees at 33 locations in the country through video-conferencing and live web streaming.
Venkaiah Naidu insisted that CPWD needs to achieve a makeover in its working and public perception through timely completion of projects, zero tolerance to corruption, transparency and accountability. During the interaction that lasted over an hour, Naidu directed top brass and all the employees of CPWD to ensure that payments are made from April 2015 to contractors only after social and third party audit of works costing more than Rs 5 Crore; Only Online payments by all the 274 divisions from April which is now being done by half of them; Introduction of Bio-metric attendance markers in all the circle and field units by December 2015; All project managers to reside at the site of work and all cases of pending promotions to be cleared by February this year.
The Union Minister noted that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s suggestion of enhancing ‘Skills, Speed and Scale’ is most suited to CPWD given its scale of operations, skills required and speedy delivery of services and should be adopted forthwith to survive the growing competition.
He noted that as a part of ongoing efforts to streamline functioning of CPWD all relevant information about 7,000 projects costing over Rs 30,000 Crore has been placed in public domain. He assured the employees that CPWD and the Ministry would do the needful to create better working conditions of its employees.
Informing them that he will interact with all of them once in three months, Naidu urged them to rise to the occasion collectively and assured them there would not be any interference in their working.
Venkaiah Naidu interacted with senior officers and others from 15 locations seeking their views on working conditions, areas of improvement required, progress of various works, changed brought about during the last eight months etc.
Shankar Aggarwal, Secretary(UD), B.B.Bhatia, DG, CPWD, Praveen Prakash, Joint Secretary, Ministry of UD and other senior officials participated in the interaction session. (INN)