Push to development work in J&K villages

A power substation at Jamotian in Akhnoor near Jammu, laying of a shunt-line from a tube-well to village Trewa in Arnia near Kathua and a new water pipeline to Panjgrain in Nagrota — works like these have been commissioned in villages across Jammu & Kashmir, to be completed within six months.

This new focus to fulfil the basic demands of the local people in a timebound manner comes after Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his Mann Ki Baat address this July praised the J&K administration’s ‘Back to Village’ programme. Under the programme run for a week in June, officers had visited villages and spent the nights there, listening to the development concerns of the people.

The J&K administration on September 4 sanctioned Rs 121 crore for hundreds of projects to be undertaken based on the feedback from people. The money is being spent with urgency on what agovernment order termed as “high-priority works with due impact and high visibility”.

A senior state administration official told ET that most works were basic in nature and showed how J&K villages were deprived of development all these years.

“During the (Back to Village) visits, most people said they wanted regular electricity, clean drinking water, better water supply or a proper road to their village. All such projects are now being commissioned to be completed by the end of this financial year,” the official said.

Some projects are improvement in nature — like Bhatyari, a village near Kathua, is getting “GI pipes” for an improved version of the water distribution network, as villagers had complained of erratic supplies from the existing system.

The administration has allocated Rs 5 crore each to the divisional commissioners and district development commissioners of Jammu & Kashmir, and Rs 1 crore to the divisional commissioner of Ladakh.

The PM in his ‘Mann Ki Baat’ radio programme on July 28 had said the ‘Back to Village’ programme, under in which officials had reached 4,500 panchayats, had shown that people in Kashmir wanted good governance and that the power of development was stronger than bullets and bombs.

The villagers were briefed about the schemes and programmes implemented by the government and asked if these facilities were available to them or not. “Even those officials who had never visited a village were available to the villagers at their doorsteps, to judge for themselves, to gauge the obstacles in the path of progress and to remove the hurdles,” the PM had said. “The people of Kashmir are eager to join the national mainstream and their enthusiasm is reflected in the mechanism of this programme. The people of Kashmir open-heartedly became equal stakeholders in this festival (Back to Village programme),” he added.

The programme focussed on how to give more might to panchayats, the PM said, adding that people had interacted in a participatory fashion, telling about their problems.