Chief Secretary Raj Bala Verma on Thursday said that women self-help groups (SHGs) should be promoted as agents of social change to ensure change in livelihood on village level.
She laid stress on categorising SHGs and said that their works in social, health, finance, nutrition and education should be evaluated and parameter fixed.
She said it while conducting a review meeting with Rural Development Department officers. Verma directed all DCs and DDCs in this regard through video conferencing.
The CS said that in order to ensure responsibilities of SHGs, work plan should be made on Commissionery level and their social responsibilities should be fixed with Aajivika. The department reported that by now, 11,000 women self help groups have been given the loan of Rs 5500.00 lakh and profiling of 31, 612 Women Self Help Groups have been done. Moreover, 24,495 families have been covered under Women Farmer Empowerment Project out of which, 8365 families have adopted lac agriculture.
During the review, the Chief Secretary directed the Rural Work Department to ensure the quality and pace of rural road construction. She said that a war room should be developed for monitoring and reviewing the development daily so that the project should be completed as soon as possible. She directed to do profiling of rural road construction and said that a special policy should be framed in which tender process can be completed within 30 days. The Department reported that presently, 6,000 km rural roads are being constructed with the budget of Rs2,000 crore from govt. of India and Sate Government.
Reviewing MGNREGA, the CS directed to constitute a PMU for daily review and develop a portal so that the latest news can be got.
The department officials informed that in 2016-17, 6.75 lakh MGNREGA workers have got their account opened with the banks and the number of active workers has switched to 27.30 lakh from 18 lakh. 21 Rozgar Sevaks creating less than 50 jobs have been sacked from their jobs and show cause notice has been furnished to 521 Rozgar Sevaks. Moreover, appointment of 666 new Rozgar Sevaks is under process. The appointment of 1687 panchayat secretaries is also under process.
Principal Secretary, Rural Development NN Sinha, MGNREGA Commissioner Siddharth Tripathi, Vandana Dadel, Praveen Shankar along with Chief Engineer and other officers were present in the meeting.