Swearing by ‘Swachhta’ in its entirety, and riding a wave of strong community movement involving panchayats, NGOs and religious, social and political leaderships, the Haryana Government is set to declare all rural areas open defecation-free (ODF) by June and all cities by September this year.
This was stated by Chief Minister Manohar lal while speaking at the NITI Aayog meeting chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi on Sunday.
He said that treading the path shown by NITI Aayog, efforts are being made by the State Government to inculcate the concept of 'Swachhta' in its entirety in the curriculum of schools and colleges. The state is giving "Sawachta Puraskars", which are monthly awards of Rs 1 lakh each, to one village in every block and district, apart from Rs 1 lakh award to each ODF village.
The Chief Minister informed that Haryana is fully geared up for effective roll-out of the GST and has convened a session of the Vidhan Sabha on May 4 to vote the SGST Bill.
Referring to Aadhaar saturation, Manohar lal said, " As on date, 2.68 crore residents have been provided Aadhaar numbers and the state ranks Second in the country in doing so. In the 0-5 age group, the Aadhaar enrolment is 78 per cent".
As many as 24.97 lakh children have been enrolled till date and currently Haryana holds number one rank in Aadhaar coverage of children below the age of five years, he said.
A State Resident Database (SRDB) is being built up to facilitate better management of disbursal of the benefits. About 1.68 crore citizen records form the Aadhaar repository and 29 e-Services of various departments have been integrated with SRDB to exchange data, he said.
Using SRDB and having close to 100 per cent Aadhaar seeding, Haryana has been able to drive Direct Benefits Transfer Schemes across departments, plugging leakages in subsidies. The state saved about Rs 350 crore in 2015-16 and about Rs 256 crore in 2016-17 due to weeding out of ghost beneficiaries of old age pension, food subsidies and scholarship schemes, said Manohar lal.
The Chief Minister said as many as 170 state G2C e-Services pertaining to 24 departments and 12 G2C e-Services of Government of India are being delivered through 4,000 Atal Seva Kendras (ASKs) and 126 e-Disha Centres across the state. Haryana shares number one rank in e-Services delivery under e-District project with Gujarat, he said.
He added, the State Government is laying great stress on crop diversification and Peri-Urban Farming to increase agricultural productivity and supplement farmers' income. Working to design, the government envisages annual growth rate of 14 per cent in cotton, 4 per cent in fruits, 5.7 per cent in vegetables, 3.5 per cent in animal husbandry and 12 per cent in fisheries, by 2022, he said.
The focus is on preservation and conservation of indigenous cattle breed to increase per capita per day availability of milk from 835 grams to 1,050 grams by 2022, and to increase overall milk production from 83 lakh tons to 112 lakh tons, with annual increase of 5 per cent, he informed.
Manohar lal also informed that Haryana ranks second in the country in fish productivity. The state has set a target to increase fish production from 1.21 lakh MT to 8.23 lakh MT by increasing fish productivity from 6.8 MT to 15.0 MT per year per hectare by 2022. Fish seed production shall increase from 6,400 lakh to 21,800 lakh with increase in area from 17,800 hectares to 54,500 hectares, said he.
The Chief Minister also advocated steps to saturate the poorest with all identified essential benefits and services. But once they get all the benefits, they should no longer be considered as poor, and should be taken off the list, he said.
He said, since not all poor households needed all the benefits, even non-poverty alleviation schemes should be fine-tuned to extend the benefits to specific households to suit their identified needs and fill the gaps.
Direct cash transfer, based on Aadhaar, could help in updating the database. In this manner, a dynamic poverty index of such families can be evolved and maintained, and poverty level gauged on real-time basis, he added.
Referring to Haryana's Vision 2030 Document which is set to be launched soon, the Chief Minister said it would aim at integrated planning, decentralized implementation, equitable development, and building human capital and skill enhancement to ensure gainful employment.
listing out some of the focus areas in the VISION 2030 document, he said these would include integrated planning and decentralized implementation; equitable development of all districts and every stratum of society, especially economic empowerment of women.
Besides stress will be laid on building human capital through education, attainment and skill enhancement to ensure gainful employment; promoting good and transparent governance through fully digitized citizen-centric services; and infrastructure growth, without sacrificing the green cover and in line with India’s climate change commitments, added he.