When it comes to apathy towards development schemes for the poor, there seems to be remarkable similarity among parliamentarians cutting across party lines.According to figures available with the Rural Development Ministry, the MPs who have shown little concern towards rural development works in their constituencies include high-profile names like the RJD’s Lalu Prasad Yadav, BJP’s Lal Krishna Advani, Congress’s Arjun Singh and Mani Shankar Aiyar, BJP’s Navjot Singh Sidhu, Jan Morcha’s Raj Babbar and Samajwadi Party’s Jaya Prada. Despite being chairpersons of their district vigilance and monitoring committees, none of the above MPs has held a meeting in this regard in their areas. Union Rural Development Minister Raghuvansh Prasad is now planning to personally write to them, as well as call a meeting of MPs during the forthcoming Parliament session, to remind them of their “responsibilities”, say sources. The Ministry had constituted the district vigilance and monitoring committees, headed by local MPs, for better monitoring of schemes for the poor at the grass-root level. But against the stipulated four meetings in a year, the MPs mentioned above have held no vigilance or monitoring meetings in their districts.But these distinguished MPs aren’t the only ones in the dock. Their young counterparts —- with the exception of the Congress’s Rahul Gandhi, Sachin Pilot and Jitin Prasada, and the BJP’s Manvendra Singh —- have shown similar disinterest towards ensuring that rural works in their districts kept on track.The Congress’s Jyotiraditya Scindia and the National Conference’s Omar Abdullah are among those who have not conducted even a single vigilance and monitoring meeting in the last one year. As a result, far from the Rural Development Ministry’s estimation of 2,400 such meetings across the country, only about 750 vigilance meetings have been conducted in that period. The better-placed states, as per the statistics available with the Ministry, are Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Orissa and Andhra Pradesh. While about 100 MPs from other states have failed to conduct even one monitoring meeting, the MPs from these states have organised more than one meeting in the last year.
