After his ‘100 Smart Cities’ endeavour, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday launched an ambitious scheme for rural India to develop around 2,500 ‘Smart Villages’ by 2019 under the Saansad Adarsh Gram Yojana (SAGY).
Modi invited all the 800 Parliamentarians to select one village each to develop it as an Adarsh Gram (Model Village) by 2016 followed by two more by 2019. He also urged the MlAs to join the movement. “If this happens then about 6,000-7,000 more villages can be added,” he said. The Prime Minister himself will choose a village in Varanasi, his Parliamentary constituency, when he visits the place on October 14.
However, there is a rider for MPs before they go scouting for the village of their interest: There should be no conflict of interest. The selected villages should neither be their own villages, nor belonging to in-laws or other relatives. Developing a model village also has to be done through active participation of local population. The Government hopes that model villages will stop migration, farmers’ suicide and provide jobs to youth at local level. “If one village is developed in a block, it is likely to have a viral effect and development would permeate other villages also,” said the Prime Minister.
Since the scheme involves politicians cutting across party lines, the Prime Minister claimed this would open the door for good politics as MPs will be acting as facilitators and catalytic agents which will negate the damage often caused by bad politics. The scheme will be implemented through village development plan, prepared for every identified gram panchayat with special focus on enabling every poor household to come out of poverty. Women participation in the decision-making process will be encouraged. According to Rural Development Minister Nitin Gadkari, SAGY will change the rural landscape of India.
To prevent from falling prey to red-tapism, the Prime Minister said that various Government schemes often worked in isolation but this scheme would help MPs point out the bottlenecks, leading to an outcome-oriented approach. He suggested identifying areas and then working on it.
These could be in the form of joint effort for developing eco-friendly gobar gas (biogas) plant that could make a village self-reliant for its fuel needs. Or having drip irrigation to meet water requirements for crops and extra nutritional food for pregnant women at local level to prevent maternal and infant mortality. The Prime Minister said all such ideas can be initiated and executed involving very few resources at the local level.
“If the same work is to be done by the Government of India then a Cabinet note will be prepared, departments will give their comments, it will get a Cabinet nod, followed by tenders etc. But through SAGY there will be no need for tenders, budget and Cabinet,” Modi said.
The Prime Minister outlined that the efforts for rural development should be progressively modified with time keeping it in tune with changes happening around the world. And though Government schemes were working across the country, in each State there were only a few villages that the State could be proud of. This shows that there was something extra that the leadership and people in those villages had done, beyond Government schemes. “This something extra is the spirit behind Saansad Adarsh Gram Yojana,” the Prime Minister said while adding SAGY would provide a flexible approach towards development.
“In Delhi, lucknow or Gandhinagar, a scheme is prepared and then an attempt is made to inject it everywhere. Through this Adarsh Gram, we want to shift from supply driven to demand driven model,” the Prime Minister said.
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