By Darshan Desai, IANS,
Amethi (Uttar Pradesh) : Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi Friday urged people of his Amethi Lok Sabha constituency to take on Uttar Pradesh government officials if they did not implement the UPA’s rural employment flagship scheme, and assured them his “full support”.
He was responding to a public representation to him at a function in Kauhar village about problems in getting jobs under the National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme. “If need be, you fight them, you have my full support,” he said, amid huge applause.
Gandhi recently led a group of villagers in Jhansi in Bundelkhand region to the residence of the area’s divisional commissioner to protest alleged irregularities in the employment scheme implementation.
At Kauhar village, Gandhi was speaking at an evening function to distribute cheques to women under a micro financing scheme. He initiated it as part of the Rajiv Gandhi Mahila Vikas Pariyojana’s women’s self-help project.
The project is like a piggy-bank of a self-help group to generate micro loans for rural people.
Gandhi said the NREGA was a revolutionary scheme of the UPA government and it needed to be implemented in right earnest. He called upon people to identify jobless younth in villages across the constituency and bring them under the employment scheme.
Referring to women self-help groups, he stated that women were the real drivers of development. “All the states like Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala are developed because of women empowerment.”
This was precisely the reason that the self-help group project was launched for women, he said. “We lighted the torch four-five years ago, it is for you to ignite the fire,” Gandhi urged the women attending the programme.