The Saansad Adarsh Gram Yojana (SAGY), one of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s flagship programmes, has failed to take off in West Bengal where most of the MPs from all major parties, Trinamool Congress (TMC), BJP, Congress and CPI(M), are yet to identify their villages. Overall, 60 lok Sabha members from five States and 52 from the Rajya Sabha are yet to identify the villages under the national scheme which was launched on October 11.
Of the 42 lok Sabha members and 16 Rajya Sabha members from West Bengal, only three have adopted a village panchayat each, so far. One of them is SS Ahluwalia, one of the two BJP MPs from the State in the lok Sabha. The other two are TMC MPs Sultan Ahmed and BC Barman, the lok Sabha member from Jalpaiguri. Barman has identified Churabhandar gram panchayat to be developed as a model village while Sultan Ahmed is keen to develop Baniban Village in Howrah constituency under the SAGY scheme which was launched by Modi in October last year.
Ahluwalia, BJP MP from Darjeeling, has adopted Hatighisa panchayat block in the Naxalbari district, and Ahmed has adopted Baniban in Howrah district. But BJP MP and Minister of State for Urban Development Ministry Babul Supriyo has not identified his “adarsh” village so far. The TMC has 46 members in Parliament with 34 in the lok Sabha and 12 in the Rajya Sabha, Congress has one in the Rajya Sabha and four in the lower House while the CPM has two in the lok Sabha and three in the Rajya Sabha.
The TMC MPs who were contacted by The Pioneer refused to come on record to give reasons for the delay in participating in the national scheme. An SMS query by The Pioneer to TMC spokesperson Derek O’Brien did not elicit any response. However, off the record some MPs contended that since there was no special fund allocated for the scheme, they kept off it.
Under the SAGY, each of the 750 lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha MPs have 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.