100,000 tribal villages to develop 5-yr plan by Oct 2

New Delhi: The Centre has rolled out a unique tribal outreach initiative that will allow about 100,000 tribal-dominated villages to prepare their own five-year development plans by October 2. The initiative, which seeks to ensure government schemes percolate down to the grassroots, will begin with training 2 million officials and then engage villagers to prepare development plans, saturate all government schemes and set up single-window centres to address grievances in each of the 100,000 villages.

The tribal affairs ministry has identified villages across 324 districts for the 'Adi Karmayogi Abhiyan' or behavioural change programme. "There are specific deliverables under this programme. While the biggest segment is training of officials, the main outcomes include 100% saturation of government schemes and a village development plan," a senior official told ET.

Officials will be trained to ensure that schemes, including nutrition, health, housing and education, reach the intended beneficiaries. Following training, which will extend down to the block and village levels, officials will assist villagers in preparing programmes that will be a blueprint of schemes villagers want implemented. "This will help administration in aligning resources with the aspirational blueprint," the official said.


Another component is to make Adi Sewa Kendras functional in each village. This will be a single accessible centre which will have information on every government department's officer in-charge, schemes and beneficiaries, grievance redressal register, a calendar for visit of officials and contact details of assigned person from the village for every department.

"This will help in streamlining the implementation of different schemes. It will also ensure answerability of the government to the villagers," said the official.

Every village will have an official deputed on Mondays to address their grievances. "After an interaction with the villagers, the officer will record what steps were taken in the grievance redressal register maintained at the Sewa Kendra," the official said.