Chief minister Nitish Kumar’s vision of all-round development is crawling at the ground level with poor implementation of his flagship urban development project.

Nitish has been campaigning to get special status for Bihar to get more funds from the Centre but the execution of Mukhyamantri Nagar Vikas Yojana has been poor.

Sources said only about 55 per cent of Rs 1,169 crore allotted to the scheme between the financial years 2008-09 and 2013-14 have been utilised till June this year. (See graphics)

Experts have attributed poor implementation of this scheme to lack of efficiency in the urban development and housing department.

“Such figures give an overall picture of the sad state of development of the cities. The chief minister’s dream is being tarnished by such crawling rate. The work was supposed to be done in close co-ordination with urban local bodies but it seems that the scheme has succumbed to the lackadaisical attitude of the officers concerned,” said R.S. Chaudhary, former chief town planner, urban development and housing department.

The officials, however, disagree. They claim that through the scheme was slow to pick up it has seen rapid growth over the past two years.

Rajiv Kumar, deputy secretary of the department, claimed that financial utilisation figures under this scheme had gone up to around 70 per cent.

He, however, did not provide any figures to justify his claim. The website of the urban development and the housing department also has no updated figures.