Jharkhand has acted promptly on the advice of the Centre and went ahead geo-tagging all the assets coming up under Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Scheme (MGNREGA). Most importantly, the newly found water conservation structure, Dovas or small farm ponds, dug widely across Jharkhand during the last year have made its space prominently.
latest information suggest that out of about seven lakh structures being built through the rural job scheme nearly five lakh of those have been geo-tagged.
“Nearly seven lakh personal assets have been created in the State and five lakh of those have been tagged with IDs. Notably, over one lakh Dovas have been geo-tagged and uploaded with their pictures on the ‘Bhuvan’ website of the Rural Development Ministry,” said MGNREGA Commissioner Siddharth Tripathi referring to the ISRO build website meant for such purposes.
Important to note here that the State quite notorious for embezzlement into MGNREGA works has since then improved its tally in the country in terms of assets creation through the scheme and also in delivering payments to labourers.
“Dovas have come up mostly in dry zones of the State where water conservation and watershed management were utmost priority. But we had to ensure that work is done on ground and for that nothing could have been more transparent than geo-tagging of the structure. It not only uploads picture of the Dova along with latitude and longitude but names of the beneficiaries as well,” added the official.
Earlier, the Government had assigned the job to the Jharkhand Space Application Centre but soon handed it over to the Rural Development Department at the behest of the Centre. Now, the technical edge has also brought some new ideas for the Department to act upon.
“We have been able to reduce uses of machines into Dova construction by 95 per cent in the State, thanks to this geo-tagging. It has provided an upper hand to us in terms of vigilance. Officials have caught several cases of deviation from the guidelines and use of heavy machines in digging up Dovas and action has been taken against those persons,” said a senior official who himself was part of some surveys the Department has conducted since the scheme was entirely handed over to it by sidelining the Agriculture Department.
Though this year there is no clear target for making the small farm ponds in the State as of now but the Rural Development Department has prepared to shift genre of the rural jobs scheme.
“For coming days we are to transform the MGNREGA largely into a watershed development programme. MGNREGA has infrastructure for work but without technical knowhow and watershed management programme has technical expertise. We have decided to make a bond of the two which is going to be implemented this year,” said Tripathi.