Added fillip to Rajiv missions in MP

BHOPAL, Dec 27: The Madhya Pradesh government will introduce the Rajiv Gandhi mission at district level wherein each district will be ask...

BHOPAL, Dec 27: The Madhya Pradesh government will introduce the Rajiv Gandhi mission at district level wherein each district will be asked to identify a major area for focus and achieve it within a time frame of two years.

A decision to this effect was taken by the chief minister, Digvijay Singh, after evaluating the performance of the Rajiv Gandhi mission in the past four and a half years. The State government had converted seven programmes into the mission and had been operating since August 1994.

According to official sources, District Planning Committee will be asked to identify a major area of concern in the district and after deliberating with State-level mission authorities, the mission theme would be finalised.

Rajiv Gandhi missions of Madhya Pradesh have been widely lauded as an effective way of signalling priority and mobilising collective action and the mission on primary education has achieved a landmark when it was able to provide a primary school in every habitation by August 1998.

The education guarantee scheme EGS also won for the State government the International Innovation Award from the Commonwealth in September 1998. The mission on watershed management, which now covers more than 33 lakh hectares in the State, has been accepted as a national model for participatory watershed management. The mission successfully demonstrated the environmental turn 8211; round of Jhabua district which was one of the most environmentally degraded districts in the country. Besides, the mission on elimination of iodine deficiency disorders, which completed its task within 13 months, had also won for the State government an international award from the International Council for Control of Iodine Deficiency Disorders.

The mission-mode has been vindicated by delivering tasks within given a time frame to consolidate and build on a practice of collective action, the government is extending the mission-mode to the district level. Missions on primary education watershed management and food security inselected tribal villages will however continue to remain at the State-level. The missions on primary education will now focus on the issue of quality and strengthening community ownership of the primary schools created by the mission and the watershed mission, in addition to covering a larger area, will move towards developing community rights and regulations for ground water management. The Rajiv Gandhi mission is expected to give a big boost to the Congress in the State and also to the chief minister, Digvijay Singh.