Himachal Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh on Thursday hailed the engineers of the State for development, more so as they worked in tough terrain to build roads and lay power lines.
“It is due to the hard work of the engineers that Himachal Pradesh, in spite of its tough topography, was a model of hill development for other States,” Virbhadra Singh said while addressing the 26th general seminar of Junior Engineers Association here.
He said that together the civil engineers, mechanical and electrical engineers in various departments were instrumental in achieving the targets and taking the State ahead so as to usher an era of prosperity and development.
“It was really tough to connect the villages in Himachal with roads and provide them electricity and water, but the credit goes to our engineers who made it happen,” he said.
He said the remotest corners of the State were connected with roads and efforts were afoot to connect every village with motorable roads. “Today, there was 35000 kilometers of road length in the State which was hardly 288 kilometers when Himachal was formed. All the villages had been electrified and there were hardly any habitations which were bereft of drinking water facility. All this has been possible due to the innovative measures and hard-work of engineers,” he said.
The Chief Minister said, “I have mostly kept with me the PWD, Education and Finance departments in all my tenures as Chief Minister as these were the backbone of development of the State”.
He said many Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) were functioning and many more have been announced to fulfill the vocational training needs of the unemployed youth so as to create avenues of employment and self-employment for youth. As many as 21 ITIs were opened during last three and a half years of the present Government regime, he added.
He also released a souvenir on the occasion and assured to examine the demands as raised by the Association.