Central Plan Monitoring System

There are over 1045 plans being implemented in the priority social sector, aimed at millions of beneficiaries across India, through the different ministries of the central government of India. Moreover, the Central Government also releases funds under Additional Central Assistance program to states to use within their region. Approximately Rs. 300,000 crores (USD 66 Billion) are released under these channels each year. Given the diversity in and number of channels through which the money is spent, the Central Government finds it necessary to ensure that the money is spent according to its intended purpose, and provide an accounting of same.

CPSMS' purpose is to provide greater transparency and accountability to social sector monitoring that has not existed until now. Financial utilization can be put in the public domain, and fund transfers to grassroots entities and utilization by them can be accessed by interested individuals and organizations. Only about 20% of these funds are routed to states through the Treasury route and 80% of funds are sent through Special Purpose Vehicles, which have weaker intrinsic internal control mechanisms available in the Treasury mechanism.

The current program-specific MISs operate with time lags and do not give a clear picture of funds remaining unutilized in each fiscal year. While funds released by the central government are immediately booked as expenditure in the Central Government accounts, utilization in the field takes time and while commercial banks enjoy the float, the Central Government must borrow to meet its fiscal deficit. This is attributable to the absence of a system that could quickly provide consolidated or granular information on utilization, advances, fund transfers or bank balances across schemes, districts, blocks or institutions. By the time utilization reports reach the State and Central level, the data is already historical, significantly limiting its utility. CPSMS will aid in better fiscal deficit management, and to ultimately move to a system of flow of authorization as against the actual flow of funds, whereby banks will first meet the expenses of the implementing agencies and then seek reimbursement from the Central Government.

MISs based on post facto data feeding suffer from drawbacks of inefficiencies, inconsistencies, gaps and perennial reconciliations, as they are not integrated with the process flow. CPSMS attempts to address this, and the associated issues of transparency and accountability related to the SPV mode of implementation, keeping all the advantages of the mode intact.

The system is now available in all the central ministries and all the state, ministry and scheme reports are available to users in these ministries. The system is being implemented in the four states of Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Mizoram and Punjab. The CPSMS-CBS interface is now functional and is providing real time information exchange with the banks. The Planning Commission has also decided to fast-track work on the system.

 All releases from the Government of India under Plan Schemes are now made through CPSMS, and all agencies receiving these releases are registered on the CPSMS Portal. 120,000 agencies have been registered. Ministry, Scheme, State-wise, District, NGO-, Individual data of releases from GOI is now available centrally on CPSMS in real time. The CPSMS data is fully reconciled with the accounting data of CGA.