Rural Development Minister Neelkanth Singh Munda on Wednesday said that the State Government was working on developing ‘Smart Villages’ on the lines of ‘Smart Cities’, the dream project of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Munda was addressing the Deputy Commissioners (DCs) of all the districts during a workshop organised by the Rural Development Ministry at SKIPA auditorium to discuss the modalities of ‘Sansad Adarsh Gram Yojana.’
“We have already started working on developing a ‘Smart Village’ in each of the panchayats which will be similar to the concept envisioned by PM Modi to develop ‘Smart Cities’ in the country,” said Munda. Although, the concept is at its initial stage, a meeting will be held soon to chalk out the modalities for developing ‘Smart Villages.’
According to Munda, since the district heads will be playing an important role in implementing the Prime Minister’s vision of ‘Sansad Adarsh Gram Yojana,’ they should take it as a challenge and try to complete their work within the stipulated time. Giridih MP Ravindra Pandey also asserted that the workshop was quite beneficial for establishing coordination and proper implementation of the programme. “Some of the confusions related to the funding was removed in the workshop,” said Pandey.
“It was also cleared what PM Narendra Modi actually wanted to show the administrative system that there was no need of extra funding for development; keep on implementing the ongoing developmental projects and development will take place automatically,” Pandey added. Development Commissioner RS Poddar also stressed on proper coordination in implementing the concept in an efficient way. “We are not lacking the hardware (Programme, Fund etc.) but the thing which we lack is the software i.e. commitment and mindset of people,” said Poddar. “SAGY should be taken as a challenge and carried out as a movement and in order to acquire success and achieve the objective of the programme,” added Poddar.
Rajya Sabha Sanjeev Kumar, however, cautioned that development of any village cannot be brought in isolation. “Projecting the village as a model one should not be the objective rather the motive should be to inspire the people to develop their villages on the lines of those model villages,” said Sanjeev. SAGY Director Kaushal Pathak explained the DCs to adopt two-pronged strategy — first, related to costing and convergence and secondly, regarding the technical steps which are baseline, PR exercise and how to form situational analysis, guideline village development programme etc to form a model panchayat within a given timeframe. Barring Hazaribagh MP Jayant Sinha, Godda MP Nishikant Dubey and Rajya Sabha MP Pradeep Balmuchu, all the 16 MPs have selected villages in their areas to be developed as model villages.