- projects due for completion during the Ninth Plan or beyond as per approvals can be included as Plan projects for which no further details need be provided;

- for all other projects the States and Central ministries would have to provide complete justification for their continuation with revised estimates of cost and time.

6.15 Project planning has to be more scientific and approval. procedures more rigorous. The factors known to cause time and cost overruns and the issue of non-sustainability of project outputs must be addressed at the planning stage itself. Extraneous influence to by-pass detailed scrutiny of projects at the approval stage must be Avoided. In any case, during the Ninth Plan only a limited number of new projects should be considered for approval. Apart from this, monitoring and evaluation of implementation of projects, including the monitoring of maintenance of existing assets need to be made more effective and purposeful.

6.16 For social sector programmes the following actions fill be taken:

- A genuine push towards decentralisation and people's participation will be given. Through institutional reforms a conducive environment for people's participation will be created for strengthening the Panchayati Raj and the different models of people's institutions. However, the Centre and States will have to jointly act to make this possible. This alone could help overcome most of the deficiencies in programme formulation and implementation.

- Reorientation and integration of all village level schemes tinder the Panchayati Raj to avoid thin spread and wastage of resources.

- The existing schemes whose delivery costs are disproportionately high or which fail to make the desired impact should be considered for reorientation and discontinuation. It is necessary to shelve such schemes whose delivery cost. exceeds, say 15-20% of the, total cost of operating the programme.

- Monitoring and Evaluation of programmes will have to be made more effective and purposeful. The Centre, States and the grassroot level organisations/institutions would all have to be involved to ensure the effectiveness of

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M/E system.

- To improve access to information on evaluation studies and findings of monitored data by the planners, policy makers and programme managers, efforts will have to be made to package the available information in userfriendly formats. The Planning Commission will bring out a compendium of evaluation studies and give wider publicity of the findings of research studies conducted and sponsored by it.

- Institutional changes to bring in transparency in implementation and operation of programmes. For this purpose, voidable barriers to full flow of information must be removed.

- Build in sustainability of outputs and benefits and maintenance of public facilities as a necessary component of project/programme formulation.

- The benefits of development are not equally shared by women. Though the political process of empowering women has taken roots, a better enabling environment is needed for women to become agents of social change. Women cooperative, self-help groups and grassroot level NGOs must be Vested with the control of social infrastructure.

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