In what is regarded as a major administrative move, the Planning Commission has cleared the transfer of the Pradhan Mantri Adarsh Gram Yojana(PMAGY) to the Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD) from the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment.
Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia has conveyed the in principle approval of transfer of the scheme to Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh saying that the PMAGY had a synergy with the programmes run by the MoRD and underlined the merit of converging it with the Total Sanitation Campaign.
The PMAGY was announced in 2009-10 for integrated development of all villages with more than 50 percent scheduled caste population. Presently, there are 44,000 such villages.
As a pilot project, it has been implemented in 1,000 villages in Assam, Bihar, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu with an allocation of Rs. 100 crore with each village to get Rs. 10 lakh per year.
The annual funding was raised to Rs. 20 lakh per village in September and Rs. 194 crore has been spent in these villages.
The government intends to cover 44,000 villages during the 12 Five Year Plan with an allocation of Rs. 50 lakh to each of these villages.
The decision to transfer the programme to the MoRD was proposed by Minister of Social Justice and Empowerment Mukul Wasnik. Now with the Planning Commission approving it, it just about needs the approval of the government to transfer the scheme to the MoRD with effect from the next financial year.
