Are you aware that the Housing Ministry of the Government of India is spending an exorbitant amount of money for your welfare? You may be having many grievances with the ways & means of Indian housing and urban development; how they fail to address the core issues. But when you get to know that the Government of India has many white elephants employed with the ministry at the cost of tax payers’ money, it only adds insult to your injury. After all, PPT presentations and high-flying proposals on paper is not going to change anything for a common man.
As per Government’s own admission, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs is spending as much as INR 2.3 crore per month on consultants only. These consultants are supposed to provide professional expertise to the Ministry for the welfare of the same common man who is perplexed with the media report of these consultants adding ornamental value to the Housing Ministry.
No! These are not rumors. Neither has a third party made such a claim; and definitely any short seller has not blamed the ministry for having costly consultants. These are the details submitted to Rajya Sabha by the Housing & Urban Affairs Ministry.
In the written reply to a question from TMC MP Saket Gokhale, the Ministry admitted to spend INR 2.3 crore per month on consultants. Just add to it, various subsidiaries of the Ministry and their billing on consultants.
In the Ministry alone, these outsourced consultants charge anywhere between INR 2.5 lakh to 5 lakh per month. And there are 112 consultants for flagship programmes of Housing & Urban Affairs Ministry.
A common man may wonder as to what happened to the Smart City Mission, but there are 18 highly paid consultants to guide the Ministry for the same. You may not be a beneficiary of PMAY-U or may even question its efficacy, but then there are 16 high-profile consultants to roll out the plan.
The issue is not just over dependance of Government over big consultancy firms here. The issue is much deeper than what appears to on the surface – what is the role of bureaucrats. Aren’t they supposed to be preparing the blueprints of mega projects and make power point presentations? The larger issue is what are the tangible benefits of hiring such expensive consultants?
And I am not being skeptical here. What I am saying is in the backdrop of the admission of no less than the President of India who says that being a tribal she knows that the benefits of central schemes like PMAY is not reaching to tribals.
So, anyone would wonder – consultants at what cost and for whose benefit. What is per capita beneficiary cost of such highly paid consultants?
When the leading financial daily Economic Times carried the news, one comment by a reader couldn’t go unnoticed. It said consultants are lobbyists for real estate sharks. Well, all that I can say on this is – No comments.
Ravi Sinha
#RaviTrack2Media
Ravi Sinha is a journalist with over two decades of cross-discipline media exposure. He is the CEO of real estate thinktank group Track2Realty. He has been writing extensively on the real estate sector for more than a decade now. Evaluation of real estate brand performance is his core domain expertise and he has immense insight into consumers’ psychograph. He has conceptualised Track2Realty BrandXReport as India’s 1st & only objective & non-paid brand rating journal that is industry-accepted benchmark of brand equity & ranking of the Indian real estate companies.
Track2Realty is an independent media group managed by a consortium of journalists. Starting as the first e-newspaper in the Indian real estate sector in 2011, the group has today evolved as a think-tank on the sector with specialized research reports and rating & ranking. We are editorially independent and free from commercial bias and/or influenced by investors or shareholders. Our editorial team has no clash of interest in practicing high quality journalism that is free, frank & fearless.
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