States asked to use e-governance for monitoring rural dev

New Delhi, Jan 15 (UNI) Union Rural Development Minister Raghuvansh Prasad Singh today asked the states to give thrust to e-governance and increase use of IT applications in monitoring of rural development programmes.

Presiding over the third meeting of the State Nodal Officers here, directed all of them to ensure that the District Vigilance and Monitoring Committee meetings are held positively by the end of the current month and its non-compliance would lead to withholding of funds to the concerned defaulter district.

Status of holding of District Vigilance and Monitoring Committees has been reviewed and it was reported that out of 585 districts, 360 districts has conducted meetings in this financial year.

The Ministry has informed all the MPs and Chairmen of Committees that they may access the monthly progress report of various programmes about different districts through its website for reviewing purposes.

Apart from the hard copy reporting, the Ministry has devised a system of online reporting of 585 DRDAs for all the programmes on monthly basis. These reports are available in the public domain on website of the Ministry www.rural.nic.in.

The Ministry has also conceptualised a programme under which districts reporting online for all the programmes for 12 months shall be given commendation and those who are defaulters shall accordingly be identified and would be suggested to the state government for taking appropriate actions, he said.

The Minister has expressed satisfaction over the fact that states have finalised permanent IAY wait list and the work in the of Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Orissa and West Bengal have generally been found satisfactory.

The Minister observed that with the introduction of the system of permanent IAY wait list, the process of selection of beneficiaries has become more transparent and the chances of malpractices in the selection have been reduced to negligible level and that there has been wide appreciation of the steps taken towards fairness in implementation of the programme.

With the introduction of new system of regular meeting of the Nodal officers of all the states, work of various programmes has improved. Earlier, there used to be long delays, which have now been reduced to a great extent. But still certain states are lagging behind and accordingly they were asked to improve, he said. The Nodal offficers are responsible for collection of reports of various programmes from all concerned implementing departments of the state government.

The Ministry has recently got the BPL Census 2002 finalised and now available on its website, where all information about every household of the country is available.

Based on this Census, the Ministry has prepared a permanent IAY waitlist for SC/ST and non-SC/ST categories.

UNI