The Government of India and the Asian Development Bank have recently signed an agreement under which the bank will provide 50 million USD of laon. It is a policy-based loan. The loan is to be utilised to improve financial management procedures, promote informed decision making, improve operational efficiencies that aim at achieving more fiscal savings and improve service delivery in the state of West Bengal. Basically, the funding is to be used to implement West Bengal Public Finance Management Investment Programme.

Public Finance Management Investment Programme

The West Bengal Public Finance Management Investment Programme aims to improve financial management procedures and operational efficiencies of the West Bengal state government to ensure financial savings, promote informed decision-making and improve service delivery in the state. The programme will be implemented based on whole-of-government approach. It would integrate state’s financial and information systems to help improve governance.

Key Features of the Programme

=> The programme will integrate the financial information systems of the state. This will help to improve delivery of public services and generate physical savings. Ultimately the integration will help the state to augment its finances.

=> The programme will provide support to interoperable government platforms.

=> It will ensure streamlining the social protection benefits such as tax payments, e facilitating gender disaggregated data, pension and provident fund and revenue collection.

=> The programme has an inbuilt module that mainly focuses on tracking and monitoring the development projects within the system.

=> Under the programme, Centre for public finance and fiscal policy is to be established. This will deepen the capacity of the state government official on public finance management. This in turn will support web-based grievance redressal systems. Bottom line the programme will provide a credible citizen government interface.

=> Additional 350,000 USD is to be allocated for technical assistance. The technologies are to be used to monitor Integrated Financial Management System reforms.