Make the gram panchayats more vibrant by devolving more powers and enhancing their capacity to make use of those. Develop a database of the panchayats which can be useful for the purposes of planning, skill mapping, enhancement of productivity and service delivery.
This was advised by Chief Secretary Jugal Kishore Mohapatra while presiding over the first meeting of the State level Executive Committee constituted under the Rajiv Gandhi Panchayat Sashaktikarana Abhiyan (RGPSA) held at the State Secretariat on Tuesday. Panchayati Raj Secretary Deoranjan Kumar Singh outlined the issues and presented the annual action plans for discussion.
The RGPSA has been launched with an objective of strengthening the Panchayati Raj system, enhancing capacities and effectiveness of panchayats, promoting people’s participation in decision making and devolution of powers as well as responsibilities to the panchayats.
It was decided at the meeting that the State would prepare a perspective plan for five years and annual action plans for each year to access funds from the RGPSA. The scheme would be funded on a sharing basis of 75:25 by the Central and State Governments, respectively. The Central funds would be allocated as per the States’ shares in rural population, the scheduled area population, the approved plan and utilisation of funds provided. Odisha qualifies all these norms of the scheme.
The committee approved the annual action plan of around Rs 181 crore for 2013-14. Besides, the perspective annual action plans approved for 2014-15 outlays expenditure estimates are Rs 275.87 crore for 2015-16 and Rs 270.27 crore for 2016-17.
The identified activities in the action plans include administrative and technical support to GPs, construction of GP buildings, capacity building and training of elected representatives, e-enablement of panchayats, special support for GPs in the PESA areas, programme management, Information Education and Communication (IEC) activities and other innovative activities for the GPs.