New Delhi: Even as the Centre is struggling to kickstart its ambitious National Infrastructure Pipeline (NIP) project amid the Coronavirus pandemic, where it plans to provide world class infrastructure by 2025, a key component of Prime Minister’s Office’s (PMO) think tank Niti Aayog – the Development Monitoring and Evaluation Office (DMEO) – which performs the critical function of evaluating 125 Central sector schemes, is currently struggling to manage its daily functioning as more than 100 of its positions at different levels are lying vacant.
According to highly placed sources, out of DMEO’s sanctioned strength of 157, more than 100 positions or 60 per cent of its total capacity, are lying vacant, which are acting as an impediment to its role of monitoring all central scheme, which also include the flagship infrastructure programmes of the NDA government like the Smart City project among others.
