By IANS,
New Delhi : Rural Development Minister Raghuvansh Prasad Singh Tuesday called on people’s representatives to actively participate in implementing rural development programmes effectively.
“The states should facilitate active participation of people’s representatives in executing the programmes meant for rural development. They can act as an effective tool for monitoring such schemes,” Singh told a meeting of state nodal officers, called to review the performance of centrally sponsored rural development programmes like the National Rural Employment Guarantee (NREG) scheme.
“More and more involvement of elected representatives will mean quality results,” he added.
The government has several schemes to improve basic infrastructure facilities, and create job opportunities for the poor sections. NREG scheme intends to give 100 days employment to a poor rural household in a year.
Expressing satisfaction over the performance of rural schemes, Singh emphasised the need for paying more attention to the execution of rural development programmes in India’s northeastern states like Assam, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh.
“Given the strategic importance of these states (close to neighbouring countries like China, Myanmar, Bhutan and Bangladesh), we need to be more serious in carrying out rural development programmes,” the minister said.
He reiterated that the payment of wages under the NREG scheme has to be made through bank or post office accounts from Oct 1 this year, and any other means of payment would be considered illegal.
Since the NREG scheme is being implemented in 603 rural districts across the country, Singh said there was a need for the online reporting of data about rural job scheme and strengthening the grievance redressal system at all levels.
He said the states must do the needful to activate the vigilance and monitoring committees at the field level so that the quality of works would not be compromised at all.