At a time when the UT administration under the guidance of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is trying hard to improve the overall performance and efficiency of the departments besides ensuring provision of all basic amenities to the people of J&K, by introducing several new reforms at various steps, there are still few snags which are creating hurdles in the path of administration to meet the desired objective. Right from the very beginning, the UT administration along with introduction of new innovative measures has also laid equal stress on correcting the misdeeds or wrong decisions taken by the earlier Governments of the erstwhile state in order to realize the vision of Naya Jammu and Kashmir. But every other day, a new challenge emerges in front of the administration, as an outcome of some previous wrong decisions, thereby enhancing its workload. Recently, in a report published, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India has detected a blockage of Rs 21.48 crore Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan funds for the last nearly four years. It was further highlighted that such a huge blockage of funds, which if utilized in time would have given a major boost to the education sector across J&K besides ensuring provision of right to basic education to every child, is the outcome of the lack of coordination and liaison between various offices of the school Education Department. It was further reported that despite having provision to utilize the funds for the development of education sector by creating necessary infrastructure and other facilities for the students in different parts of J&K, under a significant scheme of the Centre Government, the authorities of the School Education Department miserably failed to spend the same thereby keeping the children away from the improved facilities, as per the directives of Government. It was informed that the State Project Director (SPD), SSA J&K released an amount of Rs 9.76 crore in favour of Director School Education (DSE) Jammu and Rs 11.72 crore in favour of Director School Education Kashmir, in March 2017, with instructions not to utilize the same till further directions, but it is really surprising that no further directions were issued thereby resulting in non-utilization of such a huge amount of funds. Now when this issue has been highlighted by the CAG, it is expected that the UT administration would definitely initiate some corrective measures to rectify the error.
