Modi's rural push takes a nosedive as SAGY sags

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first rural development initiative, Sansad Adarsh Gram Yojana (SAGY), is faltering, so much so that a review commissioned by the Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD) recently suggested that the government consider redesigning it.

The latest Common Review Mission carried out by the ministry into its schemes found that SAGY had failed to make any significant achievement.

It noted that the implementation of the scheme was dependent on the level of interest of parliamentarians. Since the scheme was based on the convergence of other rural development programmes, it failed to elicit much interest, the Common Review Mission observed.

Modi had launched SAGY just months after beginning his first tenure in May 2014.

The scheme required each Lok Sabha MP to choose three villages from his/her constituency so that the MoRD could develop them by converging other relevant programmes run by itself or by other ministries.

Similarly, each Rajya Sabha MP had to pick three villages from the state he/she was elected.

With 798 MPs in both Houses of Parliament, the scheme, which was launched on October 11, 2014, was expected to develop nearly 2,300-2,400 model villages across the country in the first phase by 2019. This was to be followed by each MP choosing one village every year to be developed as model.

But the scheme is lagging far behind the target for the first phase itself, with the MPs so far identifying only 1,779 villages across the country for holistic development, according to the latest data available with the MoRD. The projects taken up in villages identified by the MPs are also not progressing well.

A presentation prepared for a meeting of the MoRD Performance Review Committee on December 20, 2019, revealed that while 70,111 projects had been planned in 1,493 villages (identified by the MPs till then), nearly 28% (19,331) had not even started, while the implementation of 10% (6,701) had been in progress. Altogether 43,540 projects (62% of the total 70,711 embarked upon) had been completed.

The SAGY envisaged integrated development of the selected village across multiple areas such as agriculture, health, education, sanitation, environment and livelihoods.

No fund was earmarked for the projects undertaken as the SAGY was designed to utilise resources already allocated for other programmes run by the MoRD or other ministries — like the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana and Swachh Bharat Mission (Grameen).

After visits to two SAGY villages in Hardoi and Prayagraj in Uttar Pradesh, the MoRD Common Review Mission noted that it was difficult to call them “model”. It reported “no remarkable achievement” under the SAGY in Kerala, Odisha and Manipur, because the scheme had “no specific funding”.