Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav is planning to make his small time village Saifai a future industrial, commercial and educational hub. Bringing Saifai under the jurisdiction of UP Regulation of Operations Act, 1958, the chief town and country planner has already started drafting a Master Plan for this 5,000-population village. The first step is the shifting of the division (commissionary) head office from Kanpur to Saifai.‘‘The department was working on Master Plans for many small towns for the first time and Saifai is one of them. It is only to check the haphazard growth of the area and to put a town on the path of planned development,’’ Secretary Housing and Urban Development J.S. Mishra said.The government guidelines clarify that selection of any place to be declared as a ‘regulated area’ is done on the basis of a few indicators. These are: population of the place, density of population, economic development, total workers (agriculture, industry and commercial), income of the people, geographical location of the place, position of local bodies, services like water and electricity supply, historical importance etc. There are points fixed for each indicator and areas have to score a minimum of 55 points as a pre-requisite for being brought under the ambit of the Master Plan.For instance, an area with a population of over one lakh will obtain full 20 marks, while five points for an area with a population less than 20,000. Saifai gets five points in population indicator. Officials of Housing and Urban Development and Chief Town and Country Planner, however, are tight-lipped about the total score that Safai got. Sources said that the government is set to upgrade Saifai village to a division headquarter in course of time. Headed by senior bureaucrats, a division headquarter functions as a mediator between the state and district administration.Kanpur Division has five districts in its jurisdiction : Kanpur, Akbarpur, Farrukhabad, Kannauj and Auraiya. As an initial exercise, the officials measured the distance from Saifai to other districts in the division and compared the same with distance from Kanpur to other districts of the division. And they found Saifai closer to all the districts, the sources said.‘‘Once the Master Plan of Saifai is made and it is made a regulated area, it will have all the qualifications to be converted into the headquarter of the division,’’ a senior bureaucrat said.
