PMO reaches out to urban local bodies, panchayats
Effort aims at directly connecting with grassroots administration
BHUBANESWAR/ BHOPAL/ PATNA/ THIRUVANANTHAPURAM/ NEW DELHI: In a missive from the PMO, states have been asked to furnish the contact details of all elected members of local governing bodies, including panchayats, zila parishads and municipal corporations.
“The PMO has sought these details and we provided them a couple of days ago,” said Kerala local self government secretary, Rajan N Kobragade. Kerala has already sent the details of 21,000 elected representatives to the PMO, including their mobile numbers, email id’s and addresses.
Government sources say it is an effort to reach out to the grassroots-level administration and build a direct connection between them and the PMO. Such a move is in sync with the Narendra Modi style of ‘good governance’, and has met with mixed responses.
While some states, specially those ruled by the Congress, have shown signs of resentment, others like Kerala chief minister Oommen Chandy had said that he would not blindly oppose an idea just because it was mooted by the PMO.
The Odisha government too has sent a detailed list of its locally elected representatives to the PMO.
“We have asked district rural development agencies to furnish the requisite details,” said panchayati raj department joint secretary, SN Das.
In Madhya Pradesh too, the state government has received requests — albeit not written ones — to give inputs on stream-
SOME STATES, LIKE BIHAR, HAD ALREADY PUT THIS ALIGNMENT TO PRACTICE WELL BEFORE MODI WAS ELECTED AS THE PRIME MINISTER
lining healthcare and education. The exercise, according to BJP sources, is aimed at building an integrated system that is uniformly applicable so that people migrating from one state to another are spared the rigmarole of bureaucratic red-tapism.
Then there are states like Bihar, where this alignment was put into practice even before Modi was elected PM. In January this year, state BJP chief Mangal Pandey had recalled names and contact numbers of panchayat and urban local body members, when scrap iron was being collected for the construction of the statue of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel in Gujarat.