Mamata Banerjee derails PM Modi's pet model village scheme

NEW DELHI: West Bengal has been caught in the crossfire of a raging battle between Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress and BJP. Prime Minister Narendra Modi's pet scheme - Sansad Adarsh Gram Yojna - for which MPs have to adopt a village each, has failed to get started in West Bengal with the chief minister asking her party MPs to ignore the national scheme.

Of the 42 Lok Sabha MPs and 16 Rajya Sabha MPs from the state, only two have adopted a village panchayat each so far. One of them is of course S S Ahluwalia, one of the two BJP MPs from the state in the Lok Sabha and the other is TMC MP Sultan Ahmed, who is an aberration in the party's pack.

Ahluwalia, an MP from Darjeeling, has adopted Hatighisa panchayat block in the Naxalbari district and Ahmed has adopted Baniban in Howrah district.

While TMC sources said the party chief has asked the central scheme to be ignored, it is not known why the handful of CPM and Congress MPs from the state have not adopted any village.

TMC has 46 members in Parliament with 34 in LS and 12 in RS, Congress has one in RS and four in LS and CPM has two in LS and three in RS, to make up for the total of 58 MPs from the state.

In contrast, some states like Haryana (13 MPs), Rajasthan (31), Uttar Pradesh (84), Gujarat (36), Bihar (47), Assam (13), Chhattisgarh (13), Kerala (28), Maharshtra (66), Tamil Nadu (44), among the others, have nearly completed the process of getting villages adopted by MPs.

The Prime Minister had urged MPs to develop one model village in their respective constituencies by 2016 and adopt two more by 2019.

As per the list updated so far by the rural development ministry, of the nearly 800 MPs, 541 members — 413 from Lok Sabha and 128 of Rajya Sabha — have already selected villages. Members from opposition parties, including Congress leaders Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi, SP's Mulayam Singh Yadav and JDU leader Sharad Yadav have already adopted villages in their respective constituencies.