A seasoned bureaucrat and former Union Home Secretary, Madhukar Gupta will leave Jharkhand on Saturday after a five month-plus tenure as Advisor to the Governor during the President’s Rule. looking back, he feels the State can certainly tread the path of development, considering its vast natural and human resources.
Tell us about your Jharkhand experience. We got an opportunity to do something good for the State. Government and governance should continue in public interest and priorities can be drafted focusing on transparency, good and clean governance and development. Those are priorities we tried to work on.
I do feel satisfied. I think they had been speeding up some development processes. lots of schemes have been expedited. We have tried to make sure departments take maximum advantage fund allocation with the given time.
The Centre asks us to present our capacity to utilise when you ask them for funds. We have also tried to see is how this capacity can be strengthened.
What are the major bottlenecks in course of developmentIJ One is the departmental staff crunch. Ask them why and they say, “Service rules nahi hai.” When a new State is formed, you had to restructure organisations according to your own conditions and requirements. Recruitments, promotions and related procedures have to be done according to your own needs. That process has been set into motion.
The other part of it is hassle-free clearances. There should be no corruption or divergence of funds in payments. Efforts are on for direct transfers of scholarships and other benefits. E-process, e-tendering and other such steps are initiated to minimise chances of leakage and diversions.
A series of meetings were also started with the Central Government officials to maintain better coordination. It is a continuous review process that resulted in formation of several core committees under the Chief Secretary, especially to look into issues related to forest, coal, power and roads. These committees are meeting regularly. The result of all this is that the process, schemes and sanctions have been expedited.
What do you think should be Jharkhand’s development modelIJ There is no model for development as such. Jharkhand is very rich in natural and mineral resources. Many industries have been set up and projects initiated for this and our GSDP looks impressive.
On the other hand, large volumes of population live below the poverty line. Around 80 per cent is dependent on agriculture. Health indicators are low and so is literacy rate.
This means you have to focus on agriculture and allied sectors, which we have tried to lay emphasis on. How is the migration menace going to be cured if not by making robust farming, horticulture, and animal husbandryIJ livelihood will be created there if this is done in an integrated and focused manner.
Another area is water. Only 7 per cent of the area is supposed to be irrigated while major emphasis is given to water harvesting. We have, in fact, started pilot schemes under MGNREGA. To begin with, one panchayat in every block should take up purely water-focused schemes under MGNREGA.
The third area is forest resources and involvement of the forest population. There are programmes for nursery plantation. If you plan to make up for the degraded forest even in 20 years, you need plantation over 80,000 hectares every year. This can be an opportunity for creating livelihood.
Madhukar Gupta’s take on Naxals