As was with the first phase, Members of Parliament are giving a cold shoulder to the second phase of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pet scheme Saansad Adarsh Gram Yojana (SAGY).
For, even as the deadline for adoption of a village to be developed as ‘ideal village’ under the second phase of the scheme expired on January 31, 2016, just 33 lok Sabha MPs and seven from Rajya Sabha have done so far.
However, leading by example, Modi, who is the brain behind the scheme, has already picked Nagepur gram panchayat from his parliamentary constituency Varanasi under the second phase of the scheme. In the first phase, he had adopted Jayapur gram panchayat where development activities are being undertaken by the Government and non-government organisations.
The data available from the website of the SAGY under the Union Rural Development Ministry, which is overseeing the flagship scheme, suggests that a few Cabinet Ministers like Birender Singh Chaudhary (Haryana), Thaawar Chand Gehlot (Madhya Pradesh) Mukhtar Ababs Aaqvi (Uttar Pradesh), YS Chowdary and Nirmala Sitharaman from Andhra Pradesh have come forward to adopt the villages under the SAGY’s second phase.
Under the scheme, each of the 750 lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha MPs are supposed to choose one village in their constituencies and ensure that funding from all schemes are converged there, in an effort to make it a model village. The Prime Minister had urged MPs to develop one model village in their respective constituencies by 2016 and adopt two more by 2019.
There are a total 543 lok Sabha and 252 Rajya Sabha members.
In the first phase, which took off in October 2014 when the scheme was launched with much fanfare, 44 lok Sabha members and 53 Rajya Sabha members are yet to take up the
villages to be developed as the aadarsh grams. The first deadline for adopting the villages was November 11, 2014 to ensure all-round development by 2016.
Majority of MPs have complained lack of provision for fund under the scheme for poor pace of the development activities in the adopted villages.
In the second phase the lok Sabha MPs who have identified the villages are Babul Supriya Baral and Bijoy Chandra Barman (West Bengal), Shyam Charan Gupta, Sakshi Maharaj, Mahendra Nath Pandey and Mukesh Rajput (Uttar Pradesh), Hari Babu Kambhampati, Geetha Kothapalli, Sriram Malyadri, Ashok Gajapati Raju Pusapati, Muthamsetti Srinivasa Rao (Avnthi), YS Avinash Reddy and Vara Prasadarao Velagapalli in Andhra Pradesh.
From Bihar MPs Cheddi Paswan, Ram Vilas Paswan and Rama Kishore Singh, from Himachal Pradesh it is Anurag Singh Thakur while from JK, Tariq Hameed Karra and Captain Jitendra Singh have taken lead in picking the villages under the SAGY.
The others are MP Nishikant Dubey (Jharkhand), Rangaswamy Dhruvanarayana, KH Muniyappa (Karnataka), Sushma Swaraj (MP) Anandrao Vithoba (, Maharashtra) Rabindra Kumar Jena, Balabhadra Majhi, Baijayant Jay Panda, Pratyusha Rajeshwari (Orrissa), Sumedhanand Saraswati (Rajasthan) and Bandaru Dattatreya from Telangana.
The Rajya Sabha members who have adopted villages under the second phase are T Subbarami Reddy, YS Chowdary and Nirmala Sitharaman from Andhra Pradesh, Dilipbhai Pandya from Gujarat, Birender Singh Chaudhary from Haryana, Thaawar Chand Gehlot from Madhya Pradesh and Mukhtar Ababs Aaqvi from Uttar Pradesh.