Venkaiah Naidu addresses 30,000 CPWD employees through video-conferencing; first time in 160 years

Shri M.Venkaiah Naidu addresses 30,000 CPWD employees through video-conferencing; first time in 160 years

Minister urges employees to change image of CPWD through a four pronged approach

Stresses on timely completion of projection, zero tolerance to corruption, transparency and accountability

Minister of Urban Development Shri M.Venkaiah Naidu today reached out to all the 30,000 employees of the public sector construction major Central Public Works Department (CPWD), sharing his concerns over the functioning of the organization and urging them for a change over in the public perception about it. For the first time in the history of the 160 year old CPWD, Shri Naidu addressed all its employees at 33 locations in the country through video-conferencing and live web streaming.

Shri Venkaiah Naidu insisted that CPWD needs to achieve a makeover in its working and public perception through timely completion of projects, zero tolerance to corruption, transparency and accountability. During the interaction that lasted over an hour, Shri Naidu directed top brass and all the employees of CPWD to ensure:

1.Payments are made from April, 2015 to contractors only after social and third party audit of works costing more than Rs.5.00 cr;

2.Only Online payments by all the 274 divisions from April, 2015 which is now being done by half of them;

3.Introduction of Bio-metric attendance markers in all the circle and field units by December,2015; 4.All project managers to reside at the site of work;

5.All cases of pending promotions to be cleared by February this year.

Shri Venkaiah Naidu noted that Prime Minister’s suggestion of enhancing ‘Skills, Speed and Scale’ is most suited to CPWD given its scale of operations, skills required and speedy delivery of services and should be adopted forthwith to survive the growing competition.

The Minister noted that as a part of ongoing efforts to streamline functioning of CPWD all relevant information about 7,000 projects costing over Rs.30,000 cr has been placed in public domain. He assured the employees that CPWD and the Ministry would do the needful to create better working conditions of its employees.

Informing them that he will interact with all of them once in three months, Shri Naidu urged them to rise to the occasion collectively and assured them there would not be any interference in their working.

Shri Venkaiah Naidu interacted with senior officers and others from 15 locations seeking their views on working conditions, areas of improvement required, progress of various works, changed brought about during the last eight months etc.

Shri Shankar Aggarwal, Secretary(UD), Shri B.B.Bhatia, DG, CPWD, Shri Praveen Prakash, Joint Secretary, Ministry of UD and other senior officials participated in the interaction session.