New concrete roads, pavements, a Rs. 1.15-cr community hall, underground drains and a lot more development has taken place at the far-flung Puttamrajuvari Kandriga here in Nellore district ever since iconic cricketer Sachin Tendulkar adopted this sleepy hamlet to develop it into a model village two years ago.
The poor villagers are greatly overwhelmed at the transformation that has taken place, but they are left wondering whether all this has changed their lives for any better.
The villagers rear sheep and buffalo and are very small farmers, owning land holdings of one or two acres. Some own and drive autorickshaws. There are just 114 houses, and the population comes to around 570, with 280 of them having voter IDs.
Unclean road, ubiquitous dung
The main approach road was developed with Rs.50 lakh, with an impressive pavement added, but what greets visitors is an unclean road and the ubiquitous dung left behind by cattle.
“I was thinking of getting it cleaned today,” sarpanch Bujja Nageswara Rao told The Hindu , wearing a helpless smile. He said the people were very poor and what they required was sewing machines for women and small factories that could provide jobs for men.
Pointing to the impressive community hall that had come up, Mr. Rao said the hall could hold nearly 1,000 people but the poor families could not afford to hold a function or a wedding there.
Puttamrajuvari Kandriga, 65 km south of Nellore, is actually a hamlet under the Nernuru panchayat. It has got 58 backward class households, 60 SC households and 20 ST households.
After Sachin gave Rs. 2.79 crore from the Member of Parliament Local Area Development Scheme (MPLADS) under the Saansad Adarsh Gram Yojna (SAGY), the district administration released matching funds of Rs. 2.9 crore. This came to a total of Rs. 5.69 crore which was used for overall development.
Collector R. Mutyala Raju said that Sachin sanctioned another Rs. 90 lakh and more developmental works would be taken up soon by matching it with Rs.90 lakh from the district funds.
While welcoming this development, Batta Pujitha, a mother of two, said she would have been happier had the house sanctioned for her poor family two years ago been constructed by now. She, along with all others, have Sachin’s picture on the main door as a mark of respect for the MP.
