Congress in Karnataka makes resistance to Sansad Adarsh Gram Yojana scheme poll plank

BENGALURU: The Sansad Adarsh Gram Yojana (SAGY), one of PM Narendra Modi’s flagship programmes, is set to turn into a weapon in the hands of the Congress in Karnataka, which is going for panchayat polls later this month.

The party has been given a plank to beat the central government with by panchayat raj activists in the state, who insist that the Yojana is against the spirit of the 73rd amendment to the Constitution, which decentralises planning and spending powers to the gram panchayats. Under the SAGY, each of the 750 Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha MPs get to pick one village in their constituencies and ensure that funding from all schemes are centralized there, in an effort to make it an “adarsh” (model) village.

Activists led by Nandana Reddy, convenor of the Gram Panchayat Hakkottaya Andolana (movement for the rights of gram panchayats) have given a written representation to Karnataka’s rural development and panchayat raj minister H K Patil, asking him to resist the scheme. “The scheme takes away the right of the gram panchayat and the gram sabha to be the final authority on where and how funds should be spent.

Under SAGY, the gram panchayat is not even consulted by the MP and even the selection of which panchayat should benefit from the scheme is a decision taken, ultimately, on political grounds,” Reddy pointed out.

The activists are demanding that the Congress government in Karnataka should take up the cause of panchayat raj and fight the SAGY, given that the state was the pioneer in the decentralization movement in 1983 itself. “All the money for the SAGY scheme comes from various state government departments, there is no special fund allocated to it by the Centre or by the MPs. Why should Karnataka accept this scheme? We want them to reject it,” Damodar Acharya, Reddy’s colleague, told ET.