UGC asks institutions to provide expenditure details of grants

Hyderabad: The University Grants Commission (UGC) has tightened the screws making the higher educational institutions adopt transparency and accountability about the expenditure of grants it is giving to them under various schemes.

A UGC circular sent to the universities states that if the higher educational institutions failed to adopt the Expenditure, Advance and Transfer (EAT) modules of the Public Financial Management System (PFMS) by October 10 will not get further grants from it, it warned.

The apex higher education regulator said that it has adopted the PFMS to ensure complete tracking of funds released to the grantee institutions and their further expenditure up to the end-mile beneficiary.

However, "some of the beneficiary institutions through registered under the PFMS have not adopted the EAT modules of the PFMS." Following this, it was decided that all the guarantee institutions of UGC shall mandatorily start using the EAT modules of the PFMS on real-time basis positively from October 10.

Further, all the payments to the beneficiaries and vendors by the grantee institutions hall also are made only through the EAT Module. That apart, the HEIs receiving grants shall send the EAT report downloaded from the PFMS portal giving details of the expenditure of grants received from the UGC under different schemes along with Utilization Certificate duly signed by the head of the institution.

Also, the institutions should ensure updating, posting and reconciliation of their unspent balance positions on PFMS portal positively by October 31.

The UGC also said that the head of the institutions will be held responsible for any lapse, shortcoming, irregularity in fully implementing the EAT of PFMS on a real-time basis.