In the wake of a CAG report pointing to “significant deficiencies” in the implementation of UPA Government’s flagship National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme, the Union Rural Development Ministry has decided to keep all the
Members of Parliament updated about the performance of all such schemes in their respective districts, starting this month.
In a recent letter to all MPs, Rural Development Minister Raghuvansh Prasad has informed them about the new steps taken by his Ministry in this regard and requested their active engagement in the implementation of the scheme in their respective constituencies.
According to sources, the Ministry, in collaboration with National Informatics Centre, has developed a software which can segregate data on the schemes for each districts. This data would then be e-mailed to MPs on a monthly basis from February onwards.
In the beginning, the Ministry will send the monthly reports on its three main schemes — the NREG, the Swarnajayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana (SGSY) and Indira Awas Yojana (IAY). Later it will start sending information about other schemes too.
Although the Ministry has been maintaining an online Monthly Progress Report (MPR) on its various schemes, it has so far failed to attract the attention of MPs, who also happen to be the chairmen of the Vigilance and Monitoring Committees of the rural development schemes in their respective districts.
The online data has another handicap — information from several districts in the country reaches it very late. However, of late, the Ministry has been able to get monthly progress reports from over 540 districts out of around 590 rural districts, sources said.