The Rural Development, Roads Buildings and Revenue Departments are digital now. First one is the constructive agency in the rural areas while as second one is meant for bigger constructions and the third one is the issuing authority for land records. The three departments play a key role in the development of the entire Union Territory. In the past twenty years the construction industry has changed tremendously in terms of size and complexity of the projects. Currently many construction projects have a complex design of electric and mechanical installations, employ sophisticated structure systems and serve the diversified requirements of different end users. The project complexity is a result of the industry fragmentation, which requires effective co-ordination between the project parties. Project Parties deal with large amounts of information derived from various stake holders, such as owners of the land, designers, contractors, material suppliers, banks and government departments. Accessing the information which is required at the right time is difficult in such situations resulting construction projects have suffered from poor quality, cost and time. Construction agency has extensive linkage with the rest of the economy. Building construction is considered to be an essential element of the construction industry. Completions of project/s on time, quality standard and that too within the estimated budget are the main goals of construction projects. However there is a lack of proper coordination practice amongst construction parties and its related departments. Many problems may be encountered on a large construction projects. An example this author found regarding the lack of coordination between these departments is the widening of Anantnag Verinag road via Dooru Shahabad. This road is 30 kms in length and when the first land settlement was done this main connectivity has been put 33ft indeed only 18 ft is magdamised. Seeing the sensitivity and huge traffic rush on this road the department of Road and Building gave the proposal of widening of few back and due to lack of coordination between the departments and lack of funds this proposal found its place in empty dustbin resulting heavy traffic jams are seen at every main point of the road. There are so many projects that wait for a green signal from so many years due to lack of coordination between the related departments. Coordination between certain departments from secretary level to sub-ordinate level was lacking during the previous governments but the present LG Government under the supervision of public friendly central government has made it possible resulting many projects got completed/or are near to completion in a targeted time period. LG Administration has made it clear that concerted steps should be taken and it should be kept in mind that financial constrains and allotment of funds will be given top most priority.
Few years back, on January 19,2017 Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked various arms of the government to function in cohesion under a broad vision and unfortunately government departments have a nature of working in silos. There is no coordination between the departments that is why if one department thinks about a particular programme the other department thinks opposite of that. In our Union Territory. In our union territory honorable Prime Minister’s these precious words are repeated after a gap of five years. When R&B Department magdamises a road iy does not communicate related departments such as irrigation and Flood Control, Power development department and especially Jal Shakti and when the work is completed any of these departments comes forward for an essential project whether it is laying of pipes, or Poles etc they too did not inform the R&B Department resulting the already completed work gets damaged. Even sometimes two departments of the same government confront each other in court to settle disputes by paying money to lawyers. This is not healthy situation and it needs to change. And the way to do is to sit together and in detail under a broad vision, think about the roles each department need to play and what see what results we can bring. It is essential that we work, its nature how the world is changing, in that scenario where we are standing, where we want to reach. We should evaluate these things. We have seen sometimes the departments take years to transfer land available with them to other agencies despite the land parcels being acquired. Officers spend a lot of time everyday in meetings, trying for coordination. How many road projects get delayed due to forest department there will be progress only in the officers, officials of different department and the district administration work together. Then only the goal will be achieved.
(The author is Incharge District Record Room DC Office Anantnag. The views, opinions, facts, assumptions, presumptions and conclusions expressed in this article are author’s own and aren’t necessarily in accord with the views of “Kashmir Horizon”.)
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