OdishaPlus Bureau
In a significant step forward to save paper hours of manpower, the Odisha Government has decided to go for the ‘Single Page Salary Bill” for its employees. The move will help save over 15 lakh pages of paper every month. With this significant administrative reform, the State government will be saving 1.8 crore pages in a year and hundreds of hours of manpower.
Odisha becomes the first state in the country to introduce a single page salary bill. As the pilot project in three major treasuries has come out successful, the Government is going ahead for covering all 166 Government Treasuries by the end of this calendar year.
Principal Secretary Finance Ashok Kumar Meena reviewed the program of implementation of Single Page Salary Bill issues with senior officials of the State Treasury System. Director Treasuries and Inspection Sidharth Das who is implementing the ground-breaking initiative briefed about the significant benefits of the new initiative which will help save papers as well as manpower in the treasury system.
Department of Finance decided to replace 50 odd pages of salary bills with a single page document for 4.50 Lakh employees of the State Government. Right now over 8,000 Drawing Disbursing Officers (DDO) are engaged every month in preparing Salary Bills and each Salary Bill was running up to 50 pages.
Following detailed consultations with the stakeholders and Accountant General Odisha, it was decided to go for a pilot project in this regard. AG Odisha has agreed with the State Government for such a green initiative, which will save wastage of a huge amount of papers. Major Treasuries of the capital city adopted the pilot project, and after the trial run, it came out as a great success, said officials involved in this exercise.
Preparation of salary bills is, in fact, a herculean process in which while one copy of the bill was sent to the Treasury, another copy used to be kept with DDO. This was not only time consuming, but it also used to require the involvement of huge manpower.
Now onwards officials both at Treasury and DDOs will find it easier to do the job as preparation of Single Page Salary Bill takes much less time and saves a huge quantity of papers as well. Directorate of Treasury because it all depends on the officers for the success of the program. Proper training and handholding support will be extended to the officers in Treasuries and DDOs said an official.
Nowhere in the country, such a green initiative has been introduced except the Odisha Government, which is implementing 5T vigorously.