Achievers in gujarat, rajasthan & up compiled by ARUN LAvANIA
From the green revolution through the white revolution to the cyber revolution, the nation has taken impressive strides in economic develop- ment. It is now the turn of an education revolution—quietly brewing in the rug- ged tribal belt of Gujarat. Its architect is Milind Torawane, the dynamic district collector of Narmada district. “I come from the backward district of Banaskan- tha and in my present avtar as collector of yet another impoverished district, I felt that it is education that can change the future of the rural population, especially tribals,” says Torawane.
Gujarat’s IAS officers hold a chintan shivir every three years to identify problem areas to focus on and the last such shivir picked education. Teachers in government schools playing truant is a perpetual concern and Torawane laments,“No teachers, no improvement in literacy rate.”To tackle this problem, he is introduc- ing—for the first time in the country—the biometric system of attendance for both teachers and students.This innovative system uses a biometric machine to record the check-in and check-out times of staff and pupils via their thumb im- pressions.The mid-day meal scheme will also be linked to this attendance system to avoid wastage of food.
Budget provision for this attendance scheme has been made and government approval obtained. Tenders will be floated soon and about 680 schools of the district are expected to be covered by yearend. Since power cuts are frequent, the biometric machines will be provided electricity back-up facilities.
And, since tribal families are reluctant to lose children to school because they serve as helping hands for work, Torawane plans to involve parents in income- generating projects by way of compensation.
Manju, a messiah for the masses
The Prime Minister’s National Rural Em- ployment Guarantee (NREG) scheme, launched on February 2, 2006, with a budget of about Rs 10,000 crore, is scripting an amazing success story in the predominantly rural economy of the land of warriors—Rajasthan. And the warrior who has battled heavy odds to make this possible is Dungarpur collec- tor Manju Rajpal, the topper among the women in the IAS batch of 2000. The scheme envisages 100 days of manual work at minimum wages. Rajpal has created awareness about it at the grass- roots level through the mass media and by touring villages. About 2.5 lakh of the rural population has been registered under the scheme, with 75-90 per cent being women. All those registered got work and were paid.
This zealous implementation of the scheme should lessen the largescale ru- ral migration to Gujarat during the agri- culturally lean months and also empow- er women. Rajpal has also dovetailed local voluntary organizations’ resources and objectives into achieving economic self-sufficiency. Corruption and fake en- tries in the employment rolls have been tackled by padayatras and direct inter- action with the villagers.
Good doctor, good earth
After earning a medi- cal degree, Prabhat Kumar topped the 1984 civil services ex- aminations. Four years later, during a five- month stint as chair- man, Lucknow Development Authority (LDA), the doctor-who-never-was became a social surgeon. In the face of opposi- tion from the real estate mafia and other powerful vested interests, his crusade against encroachment freed 338.4 acres of government land worth Rs 540 crore.
Construction work and development lan- guishing for 15 years were restarted in Gomati Nagar Phase II, benefiting 1,000 impoverished farmers. The cases of 8,000 plot allottees were resolved.
Prabhat’s work was based on four schemes. These were Kalyan Kuteer, un- der which homeless rickshaw-pullers be- came house owners by paying daily instal- ments of Rs 10; Pradhikaran Mitra Divas, under which disputes were resolved on a particular day each week in the presence of the allottee and the concerned LDA employee; Nikshep 1988, which offered land allottees incentives to pay off all dues to LDA; and Smriti Van Yojana, which had citizens plant trees on memorable occa- sions after which LDA nurtured them. The last saw 100 acres of land along the Luc- know-Kanpur highway turned into a little forest with 5,000 plant varieties.
The officer, now director, International Crop Research Institute for Semi-arid Tropics, New Delhi, says, “Unyielding in- tegrity of mind and purpose, and an inten- sity to win that includes courage and the conviction to take bold decisions as well as sensitivity to the people have been the driving force for me.”
