The Central Government IAS officers have been deployed to 117 districts to ensure the implementation of 7 Central Government initiated Social Welfare Schemes by Independence Day. According to the Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi, this will form the model for future implementation of welfare Schemes. He is planning to meet 2.5 lakh beneficiaries of these schemes in Jaipur on Sunday.
Eight Hundred Central Government officials including director level officers and deputy secretaries from various Ministries have been deployed to visit 75 villages. This step forms a part of the Extended Gram Swaraj Abhiyan (EGSA) that started in June 1 and will continue till August 15.
The major target is to implement and track the progress in a total of 49,198 villages with a majority of SC/ST population. According to The Hindu, a team of two to four members are sent to the villages for a minimum of 15 days. Meetings are organised in these villages in the presence of the beneficiaries, the representatives from a bank, the district and state administrative officials and the local officials..
The local officials are given responsibility to enroll the people of villages into the schemes. The presence of the team helps in the immediate sanctions for gas cylinders, bank accounts and electricity connections. EGSA dashboard allows live tracking and updates on the day to day progress.
In some cases, the State officials have been quite collaborative. In other cases, they have shown their discontent. Questions have been raised by the State Governments. The intervention of the Centre in the States, surpassing the State officials and creating direct liaisons with district officials is not taken well by the State administrations. It has been viewed as a gimmick to draw political attention and establish vote banks for Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). It has been considered detrimental to the federal structure of India.
According to a report on The Hindu, the President of the Centre for Policy Research, Ms. Yamini Aiyar said, “The new approach is not just centralized, but also personalised, converging his (Mr. Narendra Modi’s) political style with administrative functioning. It may create a veneer of efficiency and high quality publicity campaign but it undermines the logic of federalism.”
