Plan panel push for war on Naxals

The Planning Commission on Thursday approved Rs 14,000 crore for 60 Naxal-affected districts on the condition that states would have to undertake governance reforms and improve the performance of existing flagship programmes.

Updated on: Aug 5, 2010, 22:46:49 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The Planning Commission on Thursday approved Rs 14,000 crore for 60 Naxal-affected districts on the condition that states would have to undertake governance reforms and improve the performance of existing flagship programmes.

The decision comes two days before Home Minister P. Chidambaram, Environment and Forests Minister Jairam Ramesh and Tribal Affairs Minister Kanti Lal Bhuria discuss development issues with officers of the rebel-hit districts.

The money in the Integrated Action Plan (IAP) will be allocated in the next four years and would be over and above existing grants for Naxal-affected districts.

In the plan, the commission will give the state governments one-and-a-half years to implement reforms and improve performance of flagship programmes before money under the IAP is released.

Fund utilisation in existing flagship schemes ranges between 30 to 70 per cent in 34 Naxal-affected districts
being monitored by the commission.

The commission, in its internal meeting headed by deputy chairperson Montek Singh Ahluwalia, decided that states will have to implement the Forest Rights Act and Panchayat (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act to get the funds.

“The Centre will not give any additional funds for Naxal-affected districts where FRA and PESA are not implemented,” said an official who attending the meeting.

“The plan deals with both development deficit and governance deficit as emphasised by the Prime Minister (Manmohan Singh) last week.”

The commission has also addressed complaints of chief ministers at the recent National Development Council meeting regarding rigid guidelines for the central government schemes resulting in poor utilisation of funds.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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