Minister Sharma discontent with ministry performance

काठमाडौं ।

Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Rekha Sharma, has expressed dissatisfaction with the ministry and its subordinate bodies over their performance.

During a half-yearly review meeting of the current fiscal year at ministry Friday, Minister Sharma said the ministry and the bodies under it had poor performance. The achievement was slow off the mark.

Although the development problems solution meeting and review meetings record commitment for reform with encouraged employees, the achievements are elusive, she reminded, claiming, “It is not that there were no activities, but we’re not up to the mark. We failed to meet expectation. It is time to consider how we can ensure smooth public service delivery with the enforcement of plan we prepared.”

The Minister also urged the chiefs of the related bodies to come up with reform plans. Another meeting must be the meeting of achievement and progress, she directed. Sharma further asserted that the underperformance reflects unaccountability on the part of the officials in the ministry and the bodies under it.

The meeting reviewed 10 points under policy and programmes, 13 points under budget, 42 activities under annual work plan, 93 milestone and 17 indictors of achievements. Till Mangsir end, there was only 26 percent timely execution of plan, while 54 percent works were under implementation and no initiative began for 19 percent of planned activities.

There is little progress on formulation of data protection policy, purchase of national cyber drill, and restructuring of printing department, security printing centre, department of IT, national IT centre etc.

Similarly, the ministry shared that it failed to initiate works on issuance of tender for study on global trust on digital signature, and purchase software and hardware for establishment of cyber security centre. Annual plan on implementation of Digital Nepal Framework also saw little progress.

Ministry secretary Krishna Bahadur Raut directed all concerned to work responsibly to achieve annual targets.

Activities should be forwarded in a planned manner where economic and administrative indicators are essential to measure progress. Professional competence should be demonstrated with effective performance, he added.