By A Staff Reporter
Kathmandu, Aug. 28: Secretary at the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology (MoCIT) Dr. Baikuntha Aryal Friday urged the employees and respective office chiefs under the Ministry to play an active role in achieving targeted results as set in the policy and programmes and fiscal budget.
“Regulatory body must act in an active way to achieve the set goals within a year and every review meeting that is being held quarterly,” Dr. Aryal said while addressing a meeting of the Ministerial Development Action Committee (MDAC) and annual review meeting of the FY 2020/21 of the Ministry.
Secretary Dr. Aryal urged the employees to focus on delivering quality service to people rather than just giving priority in increasing users and its consumers in different offices. Duplication and overlapping trend in budgetary programmes should be filtered out in time to maintain efficiency and right execution of the prepared policy and programmes, he said.
Dissatisfied with the dismal performance in settling arrears of the last fiscal year, he said that the Ministry had been able to settle just 17.7 per cent arrears out of Rs. 3.07 billion over the last fiscal.
Similarly, the Ministry has drawn the attention of Dilliram Adhikari, Managing Director of Nepal Telecom to the company’s deteriorating service quality as well as dwindling revenue. He also questioned the reason behind that. Last year, the Telecom had earned Rs. 38.77 billion in revenue.
The current and capital expenditure of the Ministry remained 83.49 per cent (Rs. 4.46 billion) and 94.16 per cent (Rs. 1.90 billion) out of a total of Rs. 7.52 billion budget allocated for the Ministry last year. Of the total budget, the annual expenditure of the Ministry stood at Rs. 6.52 billion which is 86.69 per cent of the total allocation.
On the occasion, Secretary Dr. Aryal inquired about progress of Gorkhapatra Corporation and the reason behind not being able to take the papers to most regions of Lumbini, Karnali and Sudur Paschim provinces although its provincial offices had been established in Kohalpur of Banke in the west and Biratnagar in the east.
“Government media has basically two roles to play. One is dissemination of right and factual information among the public, and another is to work as a face of the government,” Secretary Dr. Aryal said. Government media should also utilise their capability in a more efficient way to explore new and right information, he said.
Commenting on Digital Nepal Framework programme, he said that officials from the inter-ministries had taken this programme as sole entity of the MoCIT. “Success of this programmes lies on the ownership of all the lined ministries,” he said.
He added that the Ministry should now seriously engage in data security and cyber security programme.
Under Secretary Mukunda Sharma of the Ministry said that some of the milestone programmes set in the last fiscal budgetary programme like preparing documentation for calling tender bid for establishment of National Satellite Station, preparing DPR for establishing National Cyber Security Centre and DPR for National Information Technology Research Centre could not be implemented.
Similarly, programmes set for procuring National Security Press, passing of Mass Communication-related Bill, criteria for providing Journalists Career Development Fund and beginning of its programme also failed to go into implementation in the last fiscal.
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