Bhubaneswar: With the State Plan expenditure of the Odisha government during the first half of 2011-12 financial year estimated at only 35 per cent, planning and coordination minister AU Singhdeo has directed secretaries of all departments to put in extra-efforts to fully utilise the plan funds by end of March, 2012.

According to official sources, all departments taken together have utilised Rs 4608.34 crore out of the plan size of Rs 13,000 crore for the state.

However, the total State Plan expenditure of `4,608.34 crore by September, 2011is substantially higher than Rs 3,788.65 crore spent during the first six month of 2010-11, Singhdeo said.

Briefing newsmen after presiding over a review meeting of the Plan expenditure for the current financial year at the State Secretariat here, the minister said that the State Plan had been progressively increasing over the years.

Though the expenditure during the first half was only 35.45 per cent, it was higher than the prescribed norms of 30 per cent, he said.

During the review, the minister also told the secretaries to be careful against any surrender of plan funds.

The pace of expenditure should be expedited by the concerned department in the coming months in order to achieve the minimum 60 per cent norm by December 2011, he advised.

Reviewing the performance of different departments in detail to ascertain the bottlenecks faced during implementation of different developmental programmes, Singhdeo emphasised that all departments should make special efforts to seek more and more Central funds and fully utilise it.

He also asked the departments to submit the utilisation certificates in time and comply with the observations of the Centre with a view to attracting higher Central funds.