Private firms in PPP projects may come under CAG lens

Written by Writer on Friday, October 17th, 2008

Private firms in PPP projects may come under CAG lens

17 Oct 2008, TNN

NEW DELHI: Private companies, NGOs, autonomous bodies and societies involved in public private partnership (PPP) programmes of the central government will soon be brought under the scanner of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG). They will be assessed like a government agency for fiscal discipline and for each penny of the public money used.

“Public private partnerships are becoming increasingly common in projects in the key sectors of transport, power, urban infrastructure, tourism and railways,” PM Manmohan Singh said on Thursday, stressing on the need for the premier audit organisation to “develop a system of evaluating outcomes and, beyond outcomes, evaluating impact of such key projects”.

Audit needs new skills to evaluate these complex arrangements. “I hope that all of you are alive to these new challenges,” the PM said while speaking at the auditors’ general conference in the Capital. “If we take education as an example, we could measure performance in terms of enrolment ratios or student teacher ratio as outcomes of government’s specific interventions.

However, what we are really interested in is the final impact — whether we are able to give our citizens good quality education,” the PM said. CAG Vinod Rai, pointing out the recommendations made after the three-day AGs conference, demanded more powers to tackle the changes that has taken place in the system of governance in the country. This, he felt, would strengthen the accountability framework in government.