Kathmandu, August 11

National Sports Council today said it would complete the 97 projects related to infrastructure development by April next year.

Addressing the seminar on Infrastructure Development and Planning for current fiscal year, NSC Member Secretary Ramesh Silwal said the main objective of the programme was to establish fair system in buying services and construction of infrastructure.

“We hope this seminar will help us in preparing working procedures and move forward,” said Silwal.

Minister for Youth and Sports Jagat Bahadur Sunar, NSC Vice-president Pitamber Timsina and representatives from Finance Ministry attended the seminar along with 33 engineers, chiefs of five departments at NSC and account office chiefs of seven provinces.

“We are very clear that the buying procedures should be fair and the construction works need to be carried out without financial irregularities,” he said. “We have got a total of 97 projects to be completed by this fiscal year and we have set the deadline of April next year. We will form different groups of engineers and officials from the accounts department and allocate six to seven project to each group,” said Silwal.

According to Silwal, the projects included new infrastructure as well as under-construction ones. “Some of the projects are already under construction, while some are new and a couple of them are in the process of being started,” he said. “For the new projects, we will call for tender within a month to start the construction works by September. We want all the projects to be completed by April,” he added. The total budget of 97 projects is Rs 1.87 billion.

Apart from these projects, the NSC is also mulling options for the government’s plan of one each ground at local level. “We have Rs 400 million for the programme and we are working on options as it will be around one million rupees if we distribute the amount to the local level,” said Silwal. “We will hold talks with local governments and decide on this matter later.”

Silwal said the biggest issue in the NSC was the settlement of advance which amounts to more than one billion rupees. “It dates back to Panchayat regime and three ministers have advance in their names along with 84 NSC and national associations and more than 1,000 staff. We have already started the process and we will make public the names of those who fail to settle their advance.

We will do not hesitate to take legal action also,” said Silwal.

“We have already made a decision of not giving any amount to the officials and national associations who are yet to settle the previous advance,” said Silwal.