UP LAD funds to be audited by CAG

Lucknow, Oct 3: Uttar Pradesh government has decided to go for CAG probe into all the funds related to Legislature Area Development schemes in the state while announcing zero tolerance towards corruption. "The government has given powers to the Comptroller and Auditor General to investigate all the funds provided through legislature area development fund besides now a school cannot receive more than Rs 25,000 as finance assistance from the legislators," announced UP Minister of State for Rural Development Mahendra Singh here on Tuesday. He, however, made it clear that the CAG audit would be done only on the legislators of this regime while there is no proposal for the previous ones. Addressing a press conference, to highlight the achievement of the Yogi Adityanath government in its first six month of rule, Mr Singh said the government showed zero tolerance towards corruption while transparency has been the motto of the BJP regime. Claiming that Pradhanmantri Gram Awas Yojgna was the main highlight of the six month regime of the government, he said, 'There is a target to construct 9.71 lakh units by March 2018 of which 8.69 lakh have been approved with 7.52 lakh received its first installment and 1.84 lakh got its second installment.' "To encourage gender, 85 per cent of the awas were on the name of the lady owner with now the Narendra Modi government has decided to provide free power and LPG gas with the awas besides, the owner would get additional funds for toilet and labour under MGNREGA," he said. Talking about the MGNREGA, the Minister made it clear that corruption in the scheme would not be tolerated and announced that all the projects for which work would be done will now be geo-tagging while 98 per cent of the labourers have been linked with Aadhar of the total strength of 92.11 lakh. He said through MGNREGA, the government has started constructing 11,075 Anganwadi centres of which 1,008 have been completed. Mr Singh said during the last six months, the government has made a good achievement in the rural livelihoods mission as 17,780 self help groups(SHGs) have been formed, while of these 13,661 groups have been provided Rs 15,000 each as revolving fund. He said under the Pradhanmantri Gram Sadak scheme, during the current fiscal, 84 new roads have been completed while a record 9,816.02 kms of roads were repaired and made pothole-free. The UP Minister also claimed that drinking water was the priority of the government and during the period it had installed 1160 new hand pumps and rebored 4,605 old ones in the Bundelkhand region. Besides, 211 pipeline drinking water projects were also under construction, he added. UNI