By Bizodisha Bureau, Bhubaneswar, December 18, 2015 : Odisha chief secretary, Aditya Prasad Padhi on Friday urged the officials to ensure timely delivery of services to the people.

Inaugurating the Workshop on ‘Govt Fiscal Management and Budget Analysis’ organized here Padhi said, the state government has notified more than 300 services of different departments under Odisha Public Service Delivery Act and at the same time has assured the delivery of services within definite time limit.

The CS advised the officers to focus on improvement of service delivery. “Budget spending should be outcome oriented and it should lead to improvement in public service delivery’, he remarked asking the officers to ensure rational and qualitative expenditure with real outcomes at the ground level.

Speaking on the occasion, Development Commissioner and Additional Chief Secretary, Finance R. Balakrishnan said that plan expenditure cannot be fruitful without improvement in human and societal resources. As such, he added, the plan and non-plan expenditure should go hand in hand for achieving value for money spent.

Professor Dr. Tapas Sen from National Institute of Public Finance & Policy, who joined the workshop as the Principal Resource Person and training of the officers on various dimensions of public fiscal management in the Government, said that fiscal policy should be framed as per existing economic conditions.

Sen also highlighted upon the role of Fiscal Institutions like Ministry of Finance, Department of Finance, Reserve Bank of India, NITI Ayog, Comptroller & Auditor General ( CAG) etc; and, the fiscal practices carried through treasury, banking and other channels of fiscal transactions.

Focusing on use of IT in fiscal management Prof Sen said that though different Sates at present are in various stages of IT adoption, all of them eventually would come to a higher level of IT application in coming years.

The two day workshop is being held here with the broad objective of enhancing the capacity of the Government officers in appropriate budget distribution and expenditure. Around 150 officers from finance service along with officers dealing with budget and planning are participating in the workshop.