If it is a success story here, what it is like elsewhere?
- Hueiyen Lanpao Editorial :: June 12 2012 -

For a predominantly agrarian-economy with more than 69 percent of the main work force living in rural areas, the fate of Manipur largely depends on better road connectivity across the length and breadth of the State to ensure transportation of goods and people.

However, poor road connectivity has already been one nagging problem that the people in this hilly state have encountered, thereby hampering many developmental works.

On the other hand, with poor road connectivity not only depriving the rural folks from enjoying the rewards of their sweat and toil, but also keeping them away from joining the race of development, migration of people from rural to urban area has come to pose a new challenge in the evolutionary process of the State.

In such a situation, the launch of UPA Government's flagship programmes of Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY) and Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) is indeed a boon.

Implemented since December 25, 2000 as a fully Centrally sponsored scheme, the former aims to provide all weather road connectivity in rural areas while the latter which came into force on February 2, 2006 is for enhancing livelihood security in rural areas by ensuring at least one hundred days of guaranteed wage employment in a financial year to every household whose adult members volunteers to do unskilled manual work.

However, implementation of the two schemes has been far from noble in Manipur with a number of complaints doing the round. In case of PMGSY, Public Accounts Committee of the Manipur Legislative Assembly had even pointed out the failure of achieving the target set for providing road connectivity to rural habitations, citing delay on the part of the State Government to release the sanctioned fund in time and awarding the works under the scheme to various implementing agencies without competitive biddings as the main reasons.

As for MGNREGS, complaints over unpaid wages, denial of the actual man-days or mismanagement of the sanctioned funds have been more eloquent than the actual implementation of the scheme at the ground level.

In such a scenario, we could easily understand the astonishment of Manipur People's Party (MPP) over the remarks of Union Minister for Rural Development & Panchayati Raj Jairam Ramesh when he said that Manipur is at Number I, far ahead of other States in the country with regard to implementation of MGNREGS and he would be sending a special team to study the outstanding achievement of Manipur so as to emulate elsewhere.

We do not understand whether this should be taken as a compliment or a mockery in the light of complaint galore over irregularities in implementation of the scheme.

It is questionable on what basis the Union Minister has arrived at such a conclusion only after a two-day visit and being taken to some selected sites for inspection.

If the Union Minister was saying on the basis of the works implemented on the files of the Government, then of course, we have nothing to say, because the Government files are full of success stories.