kolkata its more than an administrative calendar it is a step to make government departments accountable under the west bengal right to public service act 2013 under the act a citizen can track the progress of government projects and question delays or lapses it is not without reason that west bengal governor m k narayanan will step in at nabanna for the first time to inaugurate the calendar on thursday the purpose is to convey the message that the government is serious about delivery of public services chief minister mamata banerjee walked the extra mile on this count taking it a step forward from her predecessor buddhadeb bhattacharjee who had set up a public grievance cell in 2001 and designated a particular day in the week when department secretaries were asked to sort out public complaints taking a leaf out of the corporate book mamata opted for more transparency and also fixed deadlines for specific services holding departments accountable under the law the plan can work wonders if it goes well according to state officials publishing an administrative calendar is only a step towards transparency the finance department has already started issuing online circulars asking departments to draw funds under specific heads plan or nonplan based on which the department does a scrutiny of fund utilization by departments from time to time now the departments have to prepare the database for the ongoing projects and upload their progress so that they can be compared with the announced deadlines published in the academic calendar to begin with departments have submitted a status report on the ongoing projects to the chief secretary the updating has to be regular and nodal department monitoring projects involving more than one department has to take extra initiative to make the calendar functional chief secretary sanjay mitra was busy overseeing the departmental reports on tuesday the calendar proposes to come out of the archaic british filetracking system in which officials could track the movement of files at various levels of the administration the new system envisages total econnectivity among departments and updating information online the calendar will also pinpoint the bottlenecks in the progress of projects some departments had reported in the meeting that some files are held up in the finance department or while awaiting clearance from the land department the elevated road between jinjira bazar and batanagar water supply project for bhadreswar municipality storm water drainage for baruipur rishra and south dum dum municipalities are some of the civic projects in the pipeline