Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman reviews progress of NIP implementation in New Delhi

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, reviewed the progress of National Infrastructure Pipeline (NIP) implementation in New Delhi. The agenda of the meeting was to discuss the progress of NIP projects, expenditure incurred so far and the initiatives were taken to expedite the project implementation.

This was the second review meeting by the Finance Minister with various Ministries and Departments to monitor and accelerate NIP project implementation.

Ministry of Finance in a tweet yesterday said, "M Smt. @nsitharaman in a meeting with Secretaries of the Dept of Water Resources, River Development & Ganga Rejuvenation and @MoHFW_INDIA today reviewed the progress of National Infrastructure Pipeline (NIP) implementation.

Speaking on the occasion, Mrs Sitharaman said that NIP is a part of the Government initiative to provide world-class infrastructure to citizens and enhance the ease of living. She instructed the Department of Water Resources and Ministry of Health to push the infra-expenditure by effectively implementing all NIP projects in time and to ensure quick resolution of unresolved issues in coordination with State Governments and other Ministries. Ministries/Departments were also asked to promote investible projects by holding discussions with prospective investors. Ministries were also asked to update the National Infrastructure Pipeline dashboard regularly to allow seamless online monitoring.

During the meeting, it was explained that despite the pandemic, the NIP has managed to achieve substantial progress. The NIP was launched with 6,835 projects, which is now expanded to more than 7,300 projects. Many Ministries/departments have shown substantial progress in project implementation and expenditure, especially, in Q2 of FY21. In addition, the majority of ministries/departments have targeted substantially high Infra-expenditure in FY21 than the actual expenditure of FY20.

In the review meeting, in addition to infra spending along with annual targeted and achieved expenditure by these two ministries/departments, various initiatives taken by them to expedite were also discussed. 24 projects worth Rs 80,915 crore under the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare and 10 large projects worth Rs 2,79,604 crore under the Department of Water Resources, RD & GR were reviewed in detail along with bottlenecks, if any, being faced in the project implementation.