By Arun Pratap Singh
Dehradun, 2 Sep: Two villages of Uttarakhand that currently are included in the list of Vibrant Villages of the Union Government, will soon be delisted. This has raised the question, how these villages had been included in the list of Virbrant Villages of the Union Government and whether adequate homework had been done in the first place before these names were sent to the Centre to be included as Virbrant Villages. The Vibrant Villages is a Central scheme run by Union Home Ministry and this aims at development of border villages. The Nodal Officer of the Vibrant Villages in Uttarakhand and IAS officer, Nitika Khandelwal, has sent a proposal to remove these two villages from the list of Vibrant Villages to the Union Home Ministry and the response from the Centre is awaited. In all, 51 villages of Uttarakhand had been included in the scheme and this number will come down to 49 after these two deserted villages are removed from the list. An action plan has been prepared to spend around Rs 1,200 crore for development of the 49 identified border villages and strengthening the infrastructure there. Under the scheme, road connectivity, telecommunication network and other basic amenities are to be augmented in the identified villages which aims to keep the local population in the security sensitive border villages happy, so that they do not desert the villages for want of basic amenities.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, had started the Vibrant Village Scheme for the development of border villages. The Union Home Ministry is implementing this scheme. Many works are being planned under the scheme which will also use funds from other schemes like PMGSY, etc. In all 2963 villages across the border states like Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Ladakh, Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim etc are included in the plan. For the first phase, 662 villages have been included in the scheme and during the first phase an amount of Rs 4,000 crore has been provided. These villages will also get facilities like power, solar power and water supply besides telecom and TV connectivity and roads and health infrastructure.
