Planners told to visit villages

Country’s top planners will now be visiting villages for a reality check on the various welfare schemes launched by the government. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Oct 7, 2009, 01:19:52 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Country’s top planners will now be visiting villages for a reality check on the various welfare schemes launched by the government.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has asked the Planning Commission to depute senior advisers for “ground check” on the efficacy of the Centre’s 15 flagship programmes and schemes from November.

About half of Rs 3,25,000 crore (Rs 3,250 billion) plan fund of the Centre for 2009-10 has been allocated for 15 major schemes like the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, National Rural Health Mission and food distribution for families below poverty line.

“It will be a fact-finding mission to ascertain the performance of these schemes at the ground level,” a senior plan panel official, who didn’t wish to be identified, said.

The decision to send plan panel advisers to villages was taken after a series of meeting at the Prime Minister’s Office on strengthening monitoring mechanism for the Central government schemes.

The Planning Commission has estimated that close to 40 per cent of foodgrains under the Public Distribution System is pilfered. Quality of work under the Prime Minister’s Gramin Sadak Yojana has also come under scrutiny.

In a communiqué to all advisers, the plan panel said the Prime Minister had directed them to visit the states where the programmes had failed to give desired results.

The advisors have been asked to visit a state once every three or four months.

The preparatory work for the visits will start soon, with secretaries of key ministries like the rural development, urban development, water resources and minority affairs making presentation to the advisers on the problems being faced in implementation of the schemes.

Officials said the first visit of bureaucrats is expected to happen in first week of November.

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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