Social And Infrastructure Development Fund duration extended

New Delhi, Mar 27 : The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) today gave its approval for continuation of a dedicated Fund called the 'Social and Infrastructure Development Fund' beyond 2007-08 for funding the initiatives taken by the Government towards Social and Infrastructure development.

The initiatives include upgradation of 1396 ITIs, training of farmers, employment for physically challenged, means cum-merit scholarships, ground water recharge, social security through provision of death and disability insurance cover through LIC to rural landless households, and support to various institutes of historical, cultural, economic and agricultural significance, for improving infrastructure.

The fund will be augmented as per requirement of the Government. In the current year 2007-08, an amount of Rs.600 million will be transferred to the 'Social and Infrastructure Development Fund'.

As most of the schemes or programmes envisaged are capital in nature (funds being provided in the form of loans to create a corpus and earnings thereon deployed for funding the initiatives without depleting the corpus), the amount will be continued to be transferred to the Fund from the Capital section of the Consolidated Fund.

However, owing to the nature of social sector expenditure, utilization of the Fund for incurring revenue expenditure will also be permitted in deserving cases.

ANI