Is the Saranda Action Plan — the much-acclaimed project that is a brainchild of Union Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh — poised to start off another financial offence in JharkhandIJ What transpired at the recent review meeting of Union Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde in Ranchi is reason enough to answer the question in the affirmative.
During the review meeting on development, the Union Home Minister failed to get a tangible answer to his simple question: How much money had been spent so far on the Saranda Action Plan in the StateIJ Officials could not provide the actual figure of the expenditure on the project and the highly upset Minister expressed his anguish over their callous neglect towards financial matters.
The strategic silence over Shinde’s query implied that either the implementation of the Action Plan had gone awry owing to the presence of the Maoist outfits in the area or that the details of expenditure were not being maintained with the intention to funnel the funds out for obvious reasons. The Union Government has sanctioned Rs755.65 crore for the development of the Saranda forests and its adjoining areas — a chunk of 800 sq.km of land — on the tip-off that the security forces had flushed out Maoist outfits from the area. The Government claims that the area has been liberated from the influence of Maoists after carrying out a long-drawn anti-Naxal operation by the security forces.
As per the draft prepared by the high-powered visiting Central team for the Saranda Action Plan, the CRPF has conducted operations against Maoists and cleared the area that comprises 7,000 tribal households with a population of 36,500 in 56 villages. In his letter written to the then Chief Minister of Jharkhand, Arjun Munda on October 25, 2011, Ramesh had stated that “what we are trying to do in Saranda has enormous significance not just for that area but for other Naxal-affected regions in the country as well”.
However, contrary to the Government’s claim about flushing out the Maoists from the area, the Government machinery has hardly been able to make its presence felt. Well-placed sources at the police headquarters confirmed that the Maoists were still ruling the roost in the Saranda forest and that the police force preferred to remain on the back foot for want of fire-power that was at par with the Naxals. Maoists are said to have organised an undisrupted supply of sophisticated arms from across the border including Myanmar and China.
Although the Action Plan — that proposed to cover construction of road and about 60,000 Indira Awas, implementation of Social Protection schemes and cash payment to beneficiaries under the MGNREGA scheme in the Saranda area of West Singbhum district of the State — aims to restore normal life in the area by providing the local residents with basic amenities, the Government has been accused of keeping the hapless residents of the forest area in the dark as their basic needs can hardly be catered even after one-and-a-half year of launching of the Action Plan in October 2011.
Official sources believe that villagers consequently prefer to reap the benefits of the self-styled ‘action plan’ carried out by Naxals instead. Their plan is believed to address the plight of the local people promptly and effectively. Sources in intelligence agencies confide that Maoists run parallel welfare schemes in the area to facilitate villagers with financial and medical support as well.
Another lapse on the part of the Government is evident from the fact that the proposed construction of 24 police pickets and helipads in the Saranda forest could not be started so far owing to the possible threat of stiff opposition from the ultras in the course of the execution of work. Indiscriminate cutting of forests over an area of about 125 acres of land — at the rate of 5 acres of land identified for each of the pickets -- has been proposed for the purpose.
Incidentally, in the garb of development and ensuring security cover, the large-scale sapling cutting in Saranda was presumed to aim at extending favours to aspirants flocking around the powers that-be to get mining leases for iron ore in particular in the mineral-rich Saranda area. As per the official dossier, Saranda has 25 per cent of the known iron ore deposits in the country including Asia’s biggest deposit, the Chiria mines.