When Maj Gen B.C. Khanduri (retd) took over the reins of the Uttarakhand government as chief minister this March, he jokingly said that he would be a ‘miser’ and aim to bring fiscal discipline into the state administration. It was hoped that Khanduri, with his image of being a tough administrator with a disciplined army background, would be able to accelerate the pace of development in this backward hill state. Many here, particularly from Garhwal, still nurse high hopes about him as the first Garhwali leader after his uncle, Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna.

But after more than six months in the saddle, Khanduri has proved that he is indeed a ‘miser’ as far as state spending is concerned. The state government, in the six months that he has been in power, could spend only 17 per cent of the budget — indicating that spending on various developmental projects in the state has been sluggish at best. Out of a total annual budget of Rs 4788 crore for the year ’07-’08, the government has been able to spend only Rs 795 crore, as of September 30.

Khanduri’s decision to probe more than 50 alleged scandals committed by the previous state government, with the aim of punishing the politicians as well as the bureaucrats responsible, has had a significant impact on the ongoing developmental work. One of the problems for Uttarakhand was that when it was a part of Uttar Pradesh the region had been gravely neglected. Not more than 4,000 villages were connected with roads until 2000. The previous N.D. Tiwari regime had gone ahead with several works, some without budgetary sanction. Roads, the lifeline of people in the hill state, had figured high on the priorities of the earlier regime, which had claimed to have built and repaired 9,800 kilometres of roads, including 404 bridges linking more than 9,527 villages with roads. It had also proposed to link all the 16,829 villages of the state by road by the year 2010.

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