Directive No. 11-CT/TU dated April 8, 2026, of the Standing Committee of the Hanoi City Party Committee on "Strengthening the leadership of Party committees in building a culture of thrift and preventing and combating waste in Hanoi City" has concretized that important task. The issue is to start acting immediately and act in a substantive manner.
1. Looking directly at Hanoi's reality over the past years, although the capital city has always been one of the leading localities in saving public spending, the general state of wastefulness remains worrying. The fact that the city currently has approximately 700 land-use projects (both funded by the state budget and outside the budget) that have been delayed for several years to even a decade demonstrates significant waste. Hanoi residents are all too familiar with the sight of newly paved roads being dug up again as soon as they are completed. Many other manifestations of wastefulness can be easily seen in daily life, even within individual families and in the activities of each person.
In this context, Directive No. 11-CT/TU was issued as a timely and necessary "remedy." The novelty of the Directive lies in elevating the practice of saving to a cultural level – that is, incorporating it into the consciousness, attitudes, and behaviors of each organization and individual voluntarily, consciously, and regularly. The Directive also clearly defines, for the first time, delays, avoidance, indecisiveness, and missed opportunities for development as forms of waste, no different from the waste of material assets, which need to be identified and dealt with seriously.
Immediately after the Directive was issued, Party committees at all levels in the city began to disseminate and implement it. However, most of the work is still in its initial stages. The key to implementing the Directive is to concretize saving and preventing waste into measurable criteria and indicators linked to the specific characteristics of each agency, unit, commune, and ward. The goal is to ensure that every internal process, every activity, and every decision of each agency and unit is imbued with the spirit of the Directive and deeply rooted in the culture of saving and preventing waste.
2. To ensure the Directive doesn't remain just a written document, each agency, unit, and locality needs to clearly identify its specific areas of potential waste. A single formula cannot be applied to all. A densely populated ward will have a different risk of waste than a city-level specialized department. A school will have different space-saving needs than a hospital or a project management board. This specificization is the responsibility of the head of each unit and cannot be done by anyone else.
The directive is not a closed handbook, but rather a guide for each collective to find the most suitable cost-saving methods for their own circumstances. The top priority now is to link the implementation of the directive with the city's ongoing performance-based evaluation system for officials. Budget savings, reduced processing times, fewer unnecessary meetings, and accelerated project progress must be quantifiable indicators in the year-end performance reviews of each official and each collective.
A favorable factor in implementing the Directive is that Hanoi is undergoing a strong digital transformation. Digital platforms like HanoiWork and the online public service system that the city is vigorously deploying provide the infrastructure to transform saving into a structured habit, independent of individual consciousness. Once processes are digitized, transparent, and easily monitored, waste will have little place to hide. This also creates the conditions for a culture of saving to flourish, accumulate, and spread.
3. The effectiveness of the Directive depends not only on the self-awareness and exemplary responsibility of collectives and individuals, but also on the mechanisms for inspection, supervision, and sanctions. Experience in implementing many previous policies shows that without independent supervision and specific sanctions, even the best documents can easily become mere formalities.
The city needs to develop a measurable set of indicators to assess wastefulness in each agency and unit, avoiding qualitative assessments. The rate of public investment disbursement compared to the plan, the number of stalled projects resolved, and the rate of timely processing of dossiers are vivid, publicly accessible, and comparable metrics. Party committees at all levels should include the inspection of the implementation of the Directive in their regular work programs, using it as a benchmark for evaluating quality and ranking the performance of collectives and individuals.
Equally important is promoting public oversight. Hanoi residents are increasingly using various tools to provide feedback, from the iHanoi app to channels for receiving opinions from the Fatherland Front, mass organizations, and the press. The mechanism for receiving, processing, and publicly responding to such feedback needs to be implemented effectively, not just received and then ignored. Regular inspections and supervision must be linked to strong sanctions and strict disciplinary action, especially against those in leadership positions responsible for significant waste within their areas of responsibility. It is this multi-faceted oversight, from both the political system and the people, and especially the strict sanctions, that will create sufficient pressure to make saving a norm of behavior and gradually ingrained in the culture.
It can be said that Directive No. 11-CT/TU of the Standing Committee of the Hanoi Party Committee is not only a political order but also a message emphasizing that the resources of the capital city must be used correctly, sufficiently, and effectively. That responsibility rests with the entire political system, every official, Party member, and citizen. Now is the time to translate that commitment into concrete action, so that with each passing day, manifestations of wastefulness gradually diminish.
Source: https://hanoimoi.vn/viec-cap-thiet-phai-lam-thuc-chat-749266.html
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